The OpenShift Partner Spotlight is a recurring series that highlights the integration work our partners have done with OpenShift. This month's featured partner is NuoDB.

Let's start with an introduction: Name, role, and how long you've been with NuoDB?

My name is Ariff Kassam, I lead the product team at NuoDB as the VP, Product and have been with the company for a little over 2 years now.

For anyone not familiar with NuoDB, can you provide a quick overview of what you do?

Absolutely. NuoDB provides a container-native, distributed SQL database that allows enterprise-grade transactional applications to run completely in OpenShift.

For technical organizations who are undergoing digital transformations and adopting a distributed, cloud-first strategy through hybrid-cloud, container-native, microservice and other modern architectures, NuoDB is the only database solution that allows them to maintain their must-have capabilities that they have become accustomed to from an availability, SQL & performance perspective, in a modern architecture.

With a platform that runs on-premise, agonistically in any public cloud or in Red Hat OpenShift, NuoDB is helping the most digitally advanced enterprise organizations achieve a data management architecture that extends the competitive advantages gained by cloud adoption.

Before we get into details, what changes are taking place in the industry that drove this integration?

With the objective of significantly increasing development agility and operational efficiency, digital transformation initiatives are driving enterprises to a distributed architecture that embraces microservices and cloud, container-based computing. While enterprise architecture defines the blueprint and transformation principles to enable rapid and sustained delivery of business value, operations must consider deploying new platforms capable of supporting agile Dev/Ops.

In doing so, the technical organizations that adopt this mindset find themselves more capable of competing with disruptive, cloud-native startup companies. Whereas previously, their risk of being “out-innovated” was high, they now have an architecture that will allow them to keep pace and ultimately survive in the digital world.

And last but not least, companies recognize that in addition to the importance of the agility gained, these changes also offer opportunities to shift a significant amount of spend from CapEx to OpEx and in many cases, save a lot as they do so. That money can be reinvested into the now agile technical team and have an exponential multiplier effect.

In today’s fast pace, DevOps world, if you don’t have a cloud strategy that includes containers and microservices with an orchestration layer, your chances of survival are limited. Red Hat OpenShift and NuoDB, working together in concert, give these enterprise organizations a significant upgrade in the portability of their SQL based applications and their ability to orchestrate how those apps function in a modern architecture.

Given that, can you describe your integration efforts with OpenShift?

We’ve created a Red Hat certified container that allows customers to run NuoDB natively within OpenShift. This allows developers to easily deploy a NuoDB database through their CI/CD pipelines with their application, allow operations to automatically scale out additional NuoDB containers to address performance on-demand and protect against localized failure or disasters by easily allowing NuoDB to extend the database into a second or third availability zone.

The NuoDB integration also captures detail transactional and container memory and cpu metrics for real-time and historical monitoring purposes that is easily viewable in a web-based graphical interface.

What are the next steps for NuoDB?

We see incredible synergies between the vision for the OpenShift platform and how NuoDB’s distributed SQL database can address a broad range of enterprise needs from porting valuable existing SQL applications to OpenShift, to mainframe off-loading, to new microservices application development. With that in mind, we are committed to ensuring that as the OpenShift platform scales, NuoDB scales with it.

Additionally, we are continuing to integrate with advances in the OpenShift platform, from leveraging Local Persistent Volumes as they become fully supported and creating Operators to make the solution easier to manage.

We also recognize that the rate of transformation within enterprise companies is gathering momentum. With that will come a wave of complex challenges our customers will bring to us to help them solve. So everyday, we focus on how our platform can grow and ready itself for what’s ahead.

And finally, we have to create more awareness within enterprise companies that a full stack solution exists and that no longer will their database be a limiting factor in how they architect for the future.

What is your favorite thing about working at NuoDB?

Every day I get to wake up and go to work with some of the smartest people I know, working hard to solve some of the hardest problems I’ve ever tried to solve. It’s incredibly inspiring to feel the passion that the entire NuoDB team has for the customers we serve and the technology we are developing.

Where can people go to find more information?

Below are a couple links that will provide some more information, but we also encourage people to reach out to us directly at info@nuodb.com if there are specific questions or challenges we can help them overcome.