The Chicken Before the Egg of Cloud Migrations

For over a year I’ve been researching cloud migration best practices.  Consistently there was one red flag that trips me that I’m viewing recommended migration paths.  No matter what you read, just about all of them include the following high level steps:

As we can see from above, the scope of the project is identified, requirements laid out and a project team is allocated.

The next step in the project is to choose one or more clouds, choose the first environments to test out in the cloud, along with security concerns and application limitations.  DBAs are tested repeatedly as they continue to try to keep up with the demand of refreshing or ensuring the cloud environments are able to keep in sync with on-prem and the cycle continues until a cutover date is issued.  The migration go or no-go occurs and the either non-production or all of the environment is migrated to the cloud.

As someone who works for Delphix, I focus on the point of failure where DBAs can’t keep up with full clones and data refreshes in cloud migrations or development and testing aren’t able to complete the necessary steps that could be if the company was using virtualization.  From a security standpoint, I am concerned with how few companies aren’t investing in masking with the sheer quantity of breeches in the news, but as a DBA, there is a whole different scenario that really makes me question the steps that many companies are using to migrate to the cloud.

Now here’s where they loose me every time- the last step in most cloud migration plans is to optimize.

I’m troubled by optimization being viewed as the step you take AFTER you migrate to the cloud.  Yes, I believe that there will undoubtedly be unknowns that no one can take into consideration before the physical migration to a cloud environment, but to take databases, “as is” when an abundance of performance data is already known about the database that could and will impact performance, seems to be inviting unwarranted risk and business impact.

So here’s my question to those investing in a cloud migration or have already migrated to the cloud-  Did you streamline and optimize your database/applications BEFORE migrating to the cloud or AFTER?