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Cloud Database Decisions – What You Need To Succeed

Even the most skilled DBAs need to change their mindset when moving to the cloud. It’s similar. Yet different. What you gain in capacity – you could lose in complexity, management, and costs. That is, unless you know what you’re doing.

What to Look Out For?

The things that can make or break your move are: scalability, high availability, ease-of-management, multi-tenancy, and distributed databases for large-volume installs.

Scalability

In the cloud, you lose direct physical control. So, you need to make sure your database can scale according to your changing needs. Since the cloud is remote, it’s harder to add nodes when you need to scale out.

High Availability

If you don’t have your data replicated in the cloud – you’re in trouble. The cloud’s lack of stability makes it hard to assure high availability.

Simplified Management

Monitoring your cloud instances and ensuring their high availability and scalability is labor intensive and a 24/7/365 task. To make it easier on you, be sure your set up simplifies your management overhead as much as possible.

Multi-Tenancy

If you’re running a large volume of database instances, be sure to get a service that supports true multi-tenancy. This lets you optimize resources and ease your management. Don’t make the mistake of installing an SQL database on the same machine – in multiple copies – thinking this will create “multi-tenancy”. This can cause major problems when each instance needs to scale or grow independently down the road.

Distributed Databases

You need distributed databases – to take care of latency and network issues, as well as conflicts.

Wait, There’s a Better Way

I know, it probably sounds like I’m not in favor of the cloud. But that’s because I didn’t mention the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) option. A DBaaS provider can take care of these issues for you. Especially scalability and high availability.

What Features are you Looking for in a Vendor?

Now you have a better idea about what features to look for in a cloud database. Therefore, now you need to know what to look for in a vendor. Here are two things you’ll want to consider:

Capacity Costs

Make sure to carefully read the vendor’s SLA, to learn how much capacity is going to cost you. Remember, capacity is a highly changing variable. If your needs grow drastically in the future, your costs may also rise drastically. So, you might need to negotiate the price of added capacity, from the start.

Support

If your vendor doesn’t provide the support you need, you might have a system that won’t work well. And might even cost more to run. Ask for at least three references and call each one to verify they’re pleased. As you probably know, a vendor with a large user support group can help you troubleshoot many problems. So, look for vendors with large forums as well.

See more suggestions for how to choose a vendor in Tom Kincaid’s post: “How to Choose the Right Cloud Database: Seven Considerations”.

Written By

This post was written by: Xeround Cloud Database. With the rise of cloud computing, database scalability and availability issues are becoming critical to the growth and success of many applications. Xeround’s vision is to enable truly scalable and elastic cloud computing infrastructure by providing the missing piece: elastic data management within a cloud and data federation across clouds. Xeround's Cloud Database delivers seamless scalability and availability for your database in the cloud, within a worry-free, turn-key, Database-as-a-Service.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. John

    January 4, 2013 at 11:51 am

    Thanks Dan for the straightforward checklist. As a small business owner, I will probably need something like this one day.

  2. bonooobong

    January 4, 2013 at 12:05 pm

    I thought that cloud database solutions wouldn’t fit for professional applications because of the lack of stability and the insecure environment. Although I have to say that I haven’ heard about DBaaS before, that way could be the right one if the services corrects all the bugs. I am a little bit conservative, I need the physical control especially when it’s about important information.

  3. Aayna

    January 4, 2013 at 3:36 pm

    Hey Dan,
    Quite a simple yet engaging share. I particularly liked the close of the post, which talks about the features of the vendor, as selecting a right vendor is of utmost importance. Thanks for sharing this valuable chunk of information.

  4. Fatima

    January 5, 2013 at 7:18 pm

    It is best to have distributed databases otherwise conflicts can hinder performance. Thanks for sharing the useful checklist.

  5. Joy

    January 7, 2013 at 11:29 pm

    Great insight on the matter, been looking into various databases and I can’t seem to choose on which one. With your tips, I’ll be definitely able to choose the right one.

  6. Veronica

    January 8, 2013 at 6:45 am

    Support is definitely something everyone should look for post purchasing a product. Without it, it can be very problematic.

  7. Emilia

    January 8, 2013 at 11:10 am

    Been looking for a good database but ended up finding myself happy with the features of dropbox as a cloud storage.

  8. daniella

    January 17, 2013 at 2:22 pm

    Many thanks for this article. Some day i will be needing cloud storage.

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