An Introduction to Cloud Databases

Chapter 3. Moving Your Databases to the Cloud

Like most organizational transformations, moving to the cloud is not performed overnight. You should choose one project to try out in your chosen cloud provider: either an existing project that provides a useful test case, or a new project that is unencumbered by legacy practices.

Almost all organizations that move to the cloud do so by first doing a proof-of-concept type migration of a noncritical database. After you have picked the low-hanging fruit, or successfully moved a small project that reaps benefits from using the cloud, you can extend what you’ve learned to other databases throughout your organization.

This chapter helps you understand the criteria that are usually associated with a successful first migration. Much of our material applies to relational databases. Although each migration is unique, you will probably carry out most or all of the following steps:

Planning

• Requirements gathering

• Determining capabilities to address the requirements

• Assessment of which databases to move and what changes might be required to the database or the applications using it

• Establishing success criteria and rollback criteria (fail-safes)

Data movement

• Replication

• Incorporation of changes since the replica was created

• Application testing

• Cutover

• Post-migration checks

Optimization

• Performance tuning

• Designing high availability

• Determining what events to log and monitor

• Creating a disaster recovery plan ...