Recently, Google announced a new serverless Database Migrates Service (DMS) in preview. The service supports migrations of self-hosted MySQL databases, either on-premises or in the cloud, and managed databases from other clouds, to Cloud SQL for MySQL.
The new serverless service for database migrations is intended for enterprises to migrate to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) managed database service Cloud SQL or Google Compute Engine seamlessly. Furthermore, according to the announcement blog post, customers using the service will have the following benefits:
- Minimal downtime as the migration with DMS the data replication is continuous from source database to destination without any manual steps.
- Reliable and complete migration as DMS uses the database’s native replication capabilities to maximize fidelity and reliability.
- Serverless and secure, since there is no hassle of provisioning or managing migration-specific resources or monitoring them to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Furthermore, by migrating to Cloud SQL, customers can also benefit from integrating with the rest of Google Cloud, including services like Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/database-migration
Besides Google, Microsoft Azure and AWS offer database migration services as well. Azure provides customers with an Azure managed SQL Instance service, which allows their customers to lift and shift their on-premises applications to the cloud with minimal application and database changes. While AWS has a DMS allowing customers to do migrations such as Oracle to Oracle and heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon RDS for Oracle, MySQL to Amazon Aurora, MySQL to Amazon RDS for MySQL, or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server.
Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Cloud vendors need to attract workloads to make the economies of scale that fuel the cloud work. One of the traditional approaches is to make it easier to bring over standard software workloads - and their databases are a key target. And this is why Google Cloud is trying to enable database migration, and as it is 2020 - it is serverless. Future will tell how successful this migration offering is; Google Cloud certainly needed it to catch up to similar offerings on AWS and Azure, but typically the migration of system-critical databases is unlikely to happen due to the numerous integrations of these systems.
Josh Bielick, VP of infrastructure at Adwerx, one of the customers using Google DMS, said in the announcement blog post:
Migrations shouldn’t be a headache to set up, nor require independent research or searching through documentation. Preparing databases for replication, configuring secure source connectivity, and validating migration setup is baked right into DMS, making the setup clear, fast, and repeatable.
Lastly, Google offers migration guidelines through its best practices blog post and details in the documentation. Furthermore, there is a limited preview available for customers interest in PostgreSQL or SQL Server migration.
