RonDB News

 The RonDB team has been busy in development in 2022. Now is the time to start releasing things. There are 5 things that we are planning to release in Q1 2023.

RonDB 21.04.9: A new version of RonDB with a few new features required by the Hopsworks 3.1 release and a number of bug fixes. This is released today and will be described in a separate blog.

RonDB 22.10.0: This is a new Long-Term Support version (LTS) that will be maintained until 2025 at least. It is also released today. It has a number of new features on top of RonDB 21.04 of which the most important one is supporting variable sized disk columns which makes it much more interesting to use RonDB with large data sets. More on this feature in a separate blog post.

In addition RonDB 22.10.0 is updated to be based on MySQL 8.0.31, RonDB 21.04 is based on MySQL 8.0.23. I will post a separate blog more about the content of RonDB 22.10.0.

The release content is shown in detail in the release notes and new features chapters in the RonDB docs.

We are going to release very soon a completely revamped version of RonDB Docker using Docker Compose. This is intended to support developing applications on top of RonDB in your local development environment. This is used by RonDB developers to develop new features in RonDB, but is also very useful to develop any type of applications on top of RonDB using any of the numerous APIs by which you can connect to RonDB.

We are also close to finishing up the first version of our completely new RonDB REST API that will have the possibility to issue REST API requests towards RonDB as well as the same queries using gRPC calls. In the first version it will support primary key lookups and batched key lookups. Batched key lookups are very useful in some Feature Store applications where it is necessary to read hundreds of rows in RonDB for ranking query results. Our plan is to further develop this REST API service such that it can also be used efficiently in multi- tenant setups enabling the use of RonDB in Serverless applications.

Finally we have completed the development phase and test phase of RonDB Reconfiguration in Hopsworks cloud using AWS. Hopsworks cloud is implemented using Amplify in AWS. So the Hopsworks cloud service is handled by Amplify even if the actual Hopsworks cluster is running in GCP or Azure. RonDB Reconfiguration means that you can start creating a Hopsworks cluster with 2 Data node VMs with 8 VCPUs and 64 GB of memory with 2 MySQL Server VMs using 16 VCPUs. When you see that this cluster is required to grow you can simply tell the Hopsworks UI that you want e.g. 3 Data node VMs with 16 VCPUs and 128 GB of memory each and 3 MySQL Server VMs with 32 VCPUs each. The Hopsworks cloud service will then reconfigure the cluster as an online operation. No downtime will happen during the reconfiguration. There might be some queries that gets temporary errors, but those can simply be retried.

The Hopsworks cloud applications uses virtual service names through Consul, this means that the services using the MySQL service will automatically use the new MySQL Servers as they come online and will use the MySQL servers in a round-robin fashion.

It is possible to scale data node VM sizes upwards, we currently don't support scaling sizes downwards. It is possible to scale up and down the number of replicas between 1 and 3. The number of MySQL Servers can be increased by one and decreased and the size of the MySQL Server VMs can go both upwards and downwards. At the moment we don't allow adding more Node Groups of data nodes as an online operation. This requires an offline change.

This reconfiguration feature is going to be integrated into Hopsworks cloud in the near future.