I work with organizations around the world, and see them moving application workloads to the cloud at a rate never I never envisioned ten years ago. Our clients are spinning up infrastructure and engaging development resources to build new applications that run faster, cheaper and smarter then before. In fact, Forrester indicates that the adoption of cloud databases will double by 2020 from the existing 40%. With that in mind, I am prepared for a period of rapid growth in cloud databases during the next 12 months.
This growth is no surprise to me. I see many of our clients actively exploring ways to deploy new or upgraded applications to the cloud whenever possible. Many are building dozens of new applications a month and need to provision databases rapidly. Cloud database deployment offers them scalability, elasticity, agility, and a faster time to value. But, while developing new applications in the cloud can be relatively painless for most, our clients often find migrating existing applications into the cloud to be daunting. However, it's in the migration of existing applications where they can find the most opportunity to gain agility, become more innovative, and reclaim budget.
But, while there are no shortage of applications they might want to move, we find not every workload is equally suited for cloud deployment. I encourage our clients to consider the operational characteristics of their applications in determining how well and how easily a potential migration might proceed. For highly sensitive or mission critical applications that are operating well in their current environment, we might advise them that a move to the cloud may not be worth the risk. Additionally, many applications are actually dependent on code that lives in the database layer. Therefore, to properly prioritize workloads, we recommended that applications are segmented into different tiers based on their business importance and fitness for the cloud.
Whether our clients are targeting a large-scale project or an individual assessment, we have tools to help them identify and categorize workloads of all sizes to define the scope of the project and path to success. Using an easy-to-understand ranking scheme of green-yellow-red, we highlight workloads that are easiest and most logical to move to the cloud, requiring little to no effort (green), workloads that require a minimal amount of work (yellow), and workloads that are far more complex (red) and as a result, would require significant effort. Typically, about 70-75% of our clients workloads can move without significant effort when using the tools and skills available through EDB.
Additionally, we’ve witnessed that many of clients are reluctant to become further entangled with Oracle in their move to the cloud. We help our clients capitalize on cloud migration projects as a great opportunity to explore alternative database approaches, like Postgres. With our technology and skills, it is no longer necessary to manually rewrite all of the code to successfully migrate an application for Oracle to Postgres.
For larger organizations dealing with thousands of schema, we recommend a Migration Assessment, which offers an on-site engagement to analyze thousands of databases and run schemas to make the same migration determinations at scale. For much smaller projects, we encourage them to employ our EDB Migration Portal, where they can simply submit a schema for analysis and receive a report stating what (if anything) would need to change in the database to move from Oracle into Postgres. This makes their migration from Oracle to Postgres in the cloud more achievable and cost effective.
Moving database workloads to the cloud is a worthwhile effort as part of modernizing an architecture and being better positioned for the future. EnterpriseDB has lots of experience in this from identifying the applications and databases that are candidates to move to the cloud, then conducting assessments, and finally tuning workloads and databases for optimum performance in the cloud. The challenge of moving workloads from Oracle to Postgres in the cloud may seem daunting at first, but with EDB, it does not have to be.