4 Common Database Challenges in the Cloud and How To Find Peace
Whether your company is born-in-the-cloud or you have a corporate initiative to migrate more data to the cloud, there are a few risks and challenges with putting your “crown jewels” into the hands of AWS, Azure, or GCP. Today, we’ll outline what to look out for and how to circumnavigate around these challenges.
- The Performance You Get
If you’ve previously managed your databases on-prem, this won’t come as a surprise to you: the performance that you are able to achieve in the cloud does not even come close to the high level of performance that you can get on-prem. In fact, if you want to try to match your on-prem performance levels, you will pay dearly to get it. In order to get the performance that you need, you will need to overprovision and pay for capacity that you don’t want.
But what if paying for extra performance (and resources) is out of your budget? Then you’ll end up compromising for lower performance which can result in queries timing out, batch jobs overrunning, and your end users getting frustrated by a sluggish experience.
Achieving better performance may sound like a problem that you can just throw money at to solve. But for more intensive workloads, you won’t find any suitable solution in the cloud for achieving the ultra-high level of performance that is required.
- Data Availability
Having access to your databases whenever and wherever you need it is critical. But time and time again, we read in the headlines that one or the other major cloud vendors has had an outage. This happened, for example, with AWS on n the day before Thanksgiving, the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season in the US, leaving their retail and ecommerce customers scrambling. Moving your databases to the cloud means you are risking that you’ll lose access temporarily and, Murphy’s law, probably when you need it the most.
- Unexpected Costs
If you want to create clones, snapshots, or copies of your data in the cloud, you’ll quickly find that you’re being nickel and dimed. Since each clone and copy takes up capacity in the cloud, you will need to pay for that.
Meanwhile, licensed database software – like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server – set the license cost proportional to the number of CPUs being used. In the public cloud, you need to overprovision your VMs with more CPUs to get the performance that these databases demand. There goes a few more dollars down the drain…
- Migrating (To the Cloud and Back Again)
If you’re looking to migrate your database from on-prem to the cloud, the migration process can be a headache. As part of the migration, you might need to refactor your databases and applications to handle the new cloud architecture and the different performance challenges. But this process can be time-consuming, costly, and potentially risky.
And if your database is already in the cloud and you are looking to migrate it across your hybrid or multi-cloud, the same issue arises. Once you’ve moved your database to one cloud, it’s a struggle to move it anywhere else.
Overcoming These Challenges
Moving databases to the cloud doesn’t need to be so challenging. By deploying a Cloud Platform that supercharges your databases in the cloud, you can achieve ultra-fast performance, increased availability and data mobility, all while minimizing costs.
Join my colleague, Chris Buckel, VP of Business Development at Silk, on Thursday, March 11th for a special CIO WaterCooler Focus event on how to choose a cloud data option that helps avoid the challenges of managing your databases and other mission-critical workloads on the public cloud.
