Introducing Kinetica on Azure

Kinetica recently introduced a new native Azure Marketplace experience.  Now, it’s easier than ever to get started with the Database for Time and Space.

With just a few clicks, you will be able to provision Kinetica from the Azure Marketplace into your Azure subscription.  With the free tier (size Extra Small) and pay as you go consumption option, you can get started for free and pay only for what you use.  You can suspend and resume the cluster at any time, further reducing your costs.  And, since it’s billed directly to your Azure account, procurement processes are also simplified.

We’ve focused our new Kinetica in Azure offering on ease-of-use and time-to-value.  Instead of concerning yourself with infrastructure selection, configuration, and deployment, you can choose from a set of pre-defined deployments optimized by Kinetica, from free single-node instances for dev/test to production-ready multi-node options.  Our new Kinetica Workbench user interface also streamlines your analysis, allowing you and your colleagues to collaborate on rich interactive SQL Workbooks.  Finally, Kinetica performance and health metrics are directly integrated with Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, allowing you to monitor the performance of your Kinetica cluster alongside the other components of your analytic pipelines in Azure.

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the details of our native Azure experience and how you can get up and running today.

Before you get started

Before provisioning Kinetica from the Azure Marketplace, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• An Azure account.  Free Azure accounts are not able to provision 3rd party applications from the Marketplace, so you will need to upgrade to an Azure Pay As You Go account.
• Ownership role on the Azure subscription.  In order to provision any application from the Marketplace, you need to have the Owner role on the Azure Subscription you will be using.  If you are already logged into the Azure Portal, you can check your subscriptions and roles here: https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_Azure_Billing/SubscriptionsBlade
• Quota for the Azure resources.  Depending on the type and size of Kinetica cluster you want to provision, you will need to make sure you have enough quota for the Standard ESv4 Family vCPUs and Standard NVSv3 Family vCPUs (for GPU Accelerated clusters).  

For more details on the pre-requisites, see our documentation: https://docs.kinetica.com/7.1/azure/provision/installation/#pre-requisites

How will Kinetica be deployed into your Azure subscription?

Kinetica in Azure is implemented as an Azure Managed Application.  Azure Managed Applications are provisioned into the customer’s Azure subscription, but are fully managed by the publisher (e.g. Kinetica).  This solution provides the best of both worlds, a fully managed solution where the customer maintains complete control.  The application and related data are fully controlled within the customer’s subscription and billed to the customer’s Azure account.  

At provisioning time, the customer can specify a standard resource group (“Application resource group”) where the Kinetica managed application will be deployed.  However, the infrastructure will be deployed into an associated “Managed resource group”, with access granted to Kinetica’s support and operations teams.  Through this approach, the application and associated infrastructure is fully monitored and managed by Kinetica so that you can focus on your business application.

Choosing the right Marketplace offer

There are two different offers in Azure for Kinetica, depending on your preferred consumption and payment model and whether you are already have an existing Kinetica license:

Pay As You Go (PAYG)

With this offer, Kinetica license fees are based on your hourly usage and the size of the cluster.  You can start with the free tier (Size Extra Small), in which case you will only need to pay for the Azure infrastructure costs.

Azure Marketplace
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/kinetica.kinetica_data_warehouse_production_payg

Azure Portal
https://portal.azure.com/#create/kinetica.kinetica_data_warehouse_production_payg

Kinetica Bring Your Own License (BYOL)  

If you have an existing Kinetica license, you can choose this option and input your existing Kinetica license key. You will not incur additional Kinetica license charges, although you will be charged for Azure infrastructure costs.

Azure Marketplace
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/kinetica.kinetica_data_warehouse_production

Azure Portal
https://portal.azure.com/#create/kinetica.kinetica_data_warehouse_production

All other features are the same between the two offers.

Provisioning Kinetica

Installing Kinetica from the Azure Marketplace is similar to provisioning other Azure resources or Marketplace applications, but below are some of the highlights.

Note: For a detailed walkthrough of the provisioning process, you can refer to our documentation

Basics

• Specify the Azure subscription, resource group and region to be used for this deployment.  
• For the Bring Your Own License offer, you can enter your Kinetica license key.
• Choose a name for your Kinetica cluster.  
• Note the name of the managed resource group where the actual Azure infrastructure resources will live, fully managed by Kinetica.

Size

We’ve simplified sizing and configuration for your Kinetica cluster in Azure.  You can easily deploy smaller clusters for testing or larger clusters for production scenarios.

• GPU Acceleration: Choose whether the Kinetica cluster should be configured with GPU Acceleration.  For many use cases, GPU Acceleration is not required.  However, if you’re performing interactive geovisualization of large data sets or complex queries with high-cardinality joins, we recommend enabling GPU Acceleration.
• Kinetica Cluster Size: Choose the size of your Kinetica cluster, depending on the size of your data and your performance requirements.

Note: Not all sizes and configuration options are available in the Pay As You Go offer.

For details on sizing and configuration, see: https://docs.kinetica.com/7.1/azure/provision/installation/#size

User Information

Specify the administrator username and password.  Also provide your contact information (name and email address) so that we can better support your managed service deployment.

Networking

If you’re just getting started, you can choose the Default Network Configuration which will provision the network and subnets with default internal IP addresses and CIDR ranges.  However, if you intend to peer this network with an existing Azure network, you can also choose Advanced Network Configuration to override the defaults

Validating your deployment

Once Azure notifies you that the provisioning process has completed, the Kinetica cluster is ready to be used.

To find the URL of your Kinetica Workbench, follow these steps:

Click on Go to resource to navigate to the Managed Application. 

Click on Parameters and Outputs under Settings in the left sidebar.

Find hostname under the outputs:

Use this hostname (e.g. https://pd-oct13-prod-pre-nwuhmibhwxv62.westus2.cloudapp.azure.com from the example above) to connect to the Workbench.  See Connecting to the Kinetica Cloud Workbench in the documentation for detailed instructions.

Now you should be up and running with Kinetica in Azure! 

Stay tuned for more blog posts and using the Kinetica Workbench and managing your Kinetica Cluster in Azure.