May 5, 2021 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cloud Database Growth
May 5, 2021 at 12:34 pm
Last week I attended a 4-day training session called "Microsoft Azure Administrator". I've taken other Azure courses, but this one happened to have been the best I've taken. I learned the most from this course.
One thing that surprised me was how IaaS it was. I prefer a more PaaS approach. Of the 13 modules in the course, only one was approached from the point of view of PaaS. And that module was more about setting up containers and Kubernetes.
That left me with wondering, is IaaS the preferred approach by people adopting a cloud presence, whether that's fully cloud based or mixed? And if IaaS is the preferred approach over PaaS, why is IaaS the preferred approach?
Rod
May 5, 2021 at 5:28 pm
I would have thought most people would look to adopt a PaaS approach, often because of cost, but that's not the case. PaaS often requires more application changes and code rewriting. Dev is hard, because you have to buy another PaaS instance for Dev and another for QA. I think vendors haven't thought this through well from the standpoint of the software lifecycle.
IaaS is flexible, and simple. I can move my infrastructure up to the cloud, get rid of some on premises hardware costs, be flexible on sizing, and keep dev/test the same. The adoption of IaaS, and especially Managed Instance, has been much quicker and more widespread than I expected. I think getting rid of backups, of staff focusing on hardware and more has been a boon to many companies. It's a life and shift, easier than moving data centers.
May 6, 2021 at 12:49 am
Thank you, Steve, your explanation makes sense to me.
Rod
May 6, 2021 at 12:49 pm
...
That left me with wondering, is IaaS the preferred approach by people adopting a cloud presence, whether that's fully cloud based or mixed? And if IaaS is the preferred approach over PaaS, why is IaaS the preferred approach?
Speaking of SQL Server specifically, we currently have a hybrid environment where most of our line of business and 3rd party ISV databases are still in the on-prem data center, a few instances we did a lift / shift to IaaS VM, and most new development is in Azure SQL or Cosmos DB. Having the capability to scale out storage and cpu / memory in the cloud is an obvious selling point for moving to Azure hosting, but for many legacy applications there is no strong an compelling reason to go through the process of refactoring it to a PaaS solution. It's the NextGen version of the application under development that tends to be Azure top to bottom.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
May 6, 2021 at 11:46 pm
That is a very good point, Eric. I like that approach. I suspect that for the near future (<= 5 years) it might be best to do that approach where new development is done in the cloud, but leave your legacy databases and apps on-prem.
Rod
May 10, 2021 at 2:29 pm
That is a very good point, Eric. I like that approach. I suspect that for the near future (<= 5 years) it might be best to do that approach where new development is done in the cloud, but leave your legacy databases and apps on-prem.
Also, applications that run queries spanning multiple databases (cross database joins) are more difficult to migrate to Azure SQL. To get this to work in a similar way to what you've been doing, you first have to configure 'Elastic Query', creating definition for external sources and tables, etc. It's similar to linked server connections. Another issue is performance. Cross database queries on Azure SQL won't perform or behave in the same was that they do on-prem. The reason is that in Azure the SQL 'server' or instance is a logical resource container, and each database can actually reside on a different machine behind the scenes.
Of course, you can lift and shift the on-prem SQL Server instance to an Azure VM or manages instance with little modification, but then that's IaaS and not PaaS.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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