October 28, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Hello,
It seems that we have a direction to move to AWS RDS for our current SQL Server environments. I am currently working on a small database project which is being built on RDS, so I have some experience with RDS. It's fine for a small project, but my question concerns moving our current Production, QA and UAT environments to RDS. Since you cannot backup and restore across RDS environments, how would you suggest refreshing our QA and UAT environments from Production? We do this on a regular basis now and, of course, I use backup and restore. I know you can BCP out the data and back in with RDS, but several of our production databases are in the 100GB range. That would take quite a while. Anyone have experience with refreshing large databases across RDS environments?
Thanks,
Warren
October 29, 2013 at 9:10 am
You sound new to AWS. If so, then ask your AWS Account Manager for advice, this is a problem that others have come across and resolved.
When we went to AWS, we decided to do a lift and shift using AWS as a IaaS, not as a PaaS. This meant we could exploit most of the skills we already had in managing servers, while gaining the advantages of cloud hosting. The end result is wht you might expect from IaaS: we have a number of Windows instances running on EC2 instances, and we manage everything from the OS upwards. If a box needs SQL Server or IIS or whatever, we install it and manage it ourselves.
We explicitly decided against using RDS in our initial move, as we felt this would make the learning curve too steep and add a lot of risk to the project. After about a year of using AWS we are now looking at a PaaS implementation using Redshift for a BI project.
Hopefully the people who decided you should go down the RDS PaaS route have thought through the implications, and worked out the principles of how you can do the data refreshes you need. If this has not been done then an important step in planning and risk analysis has also not been done.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara
October 29, 2013 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the reply. I am definitely new to AWS. From what I have seen working with a brand-new, startup project using RDS, I don't think it's the correct direction to go for our current production environment. Refreshes of environments is just one of the many issues I forsee. Unfortunately, the people who make these decisions here know very little about SQL Server, so I am trying to get involved before it's too late and we're forced down the RDS route. Ah, the fun working in a very large company with a few people making decisions that affect many others without getting their input.....
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