First of all, IT professionals have to find out in which cases the cloud is advantageous in which way for their applications. Databases are usually the hardest to assess in evaluating cloud eligibility and migration planning. However, each application is based on data. It is important to ensure that databases integrate well with the cloud. Here are some concepts and recommendations to consider when migrating databases to the cloud.
1. Performance - one less worry
It's mainly performance concerns that prevent IT professionals from moving databases to virtual environments or the cloud. However, they are often unfounded as the performance requirements of many applications are more than met by many cloud architectures. Over the past three years, cloud technology has made great strides and now supports several, sometimes high-performance, database deployment options.
2. Transparency - better decision
Performance problems are often solved in the simplest way, namely by increasing the hardware. But this approach is not the last word - especially from a cost perspective. It makes more sense to have a comprehensive monitoring. A database monitoring tool captures the actual database and resource requirements of an application. These include: CPU, storage, memory, latency, and storage throughput (IOPS is a sometimes deceptive measure); the planned storage growth and backup-Conditions; Resource fluctuation based on application load during peak periods or batch processes; and last but not least, data connection dependencies - in addition to the connections to the actual applications, there may be additional requirements for data exchange, backups and incoming data.One of the benefits of the cloud is the ability to dynamically scale resources for both increased and decreased demand. Not only does a cloud deployment have to raise performance concerns, but it can also reassure those responsible for using that resource by assigning each application the resource capacity that meets its performance requirements. The prerequisite for this, however, is that these requirements are known.
3. Testing - do not forget!
Further advantagesThe Cloud - and two of the most obvious - are the low cost and the multiple accessibility options that come with it. Even if a company is not yet working on a migration plan, it should already be familiar with cloud databases. Helps experiment - and use the collected impressions for the migration initiative. It only takes about an hour to set up a database in the cloud. Therefore, interested companies should just try it out, test it and then delete it. The costs are minimal. With a little more time and money, they can also move the copy of a production database to the cloud to test the deployment options and find out how their application and database will behave in the cloud.
4. Provision - plan the model carefully
Deployment can be done in the cloud in several ways. Therefore, those responsible must examine all options in this regard. DBAaS (" Database as a Service ") as a managed service offers easy deployment and automation. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) on the other hand provides administrators with more control options when running database instances on cloud servers. At the same time, the interface and functionality of traditional on-premise deployment remain the samereceive. In addition, there are several storage options, such as block storage, SSDs, guaranteed IOPS, dedicated connections, and database-optimized instances. As companies tend to share cloud resources with other users, it is also necessary to test the consistency and variability of performance in addition to theoretical excellence.
