Chapter 4. Conclusion

For many years after Amazon.com opened the first major cloud offering, the trade press presented the question facing system administrators and DBAs as “Cloud or not cloud?” Soon, on-premises clouds and hybrid offerings joined pure cloud solutions as options to consider. But the choices were always more complicated. As this report has shown, offerings have multiplied rapidly. DBAs must simultaneously evaluate databases along all the following axes:

• Third-party vendor, on-premises, or hybrid

• Relational or one of the many nonrelational varieties

• Managed or self-managed

• Cloud native (e.g., Amazon Aurora) or cross-platform (e.g., MySQL)

• Whether to take advantage of performance enhancements such as solid-state drives or caches

• Physical locations of cloud regions and availability zones

• Ease of migration

• Relevant skills needed and possessed by your staff

• Other aspects of vendor support and reputation

It is not a good idea to prematurely tie yourself to a choice in one area before looking at all options. It can well be that you can save a lot of money and improve customer experience by taking on some extra training or making a leap into an unfamiliar technology.

In addition to laying out the basic criteria for choosing databases, this report has tried to help you prepare a move to the cloud by preparing you for the changes that will likely occur in your responsibilities and tasks. Some responsibilities and tasks are simplified or removed by moving to the cloud, but you will also have new technologies to learn and will need to begin thinking in new ways about goals such as high availability and optimization.

You will learn a lot during your first migration, or by starting a new project in the cloud. Each project will clarify the landscape of cloud databases for you, and give you ideas for your next project. And hopefully, this report will alert you to what you need to look out for along the way.