Issue link: https://resources.awscloud.com/i/1496553
©2020 IDC #US46773920 3 The Freedom and Challenges of Open Source Some enterprises have turned entirely to open source as their route to the cloud. Because the source code of the DBMS is available, even if the DBMS is not fully compatible with the intended deployment environment, any operational difficulties can be addressed in the code. Also, the leading open source projects are well understood among developers, so finding developers who can work with the leading open source technologies, including DBMSs, is generally not a problem. But going the pure open source route poses its own challenge. Open source solutions, in and of themselves, also tend to lack capabilities required by most enterprises in areas such as service-level agreement (SLA) guarantees of availability, scalability, and performance, as well as data security and privacy support. Also, in the absence of a professional support organization, enterprises must support themselves entirely. When problems arise, their engineers must pore over the open source code and find an answer. If the problem is in the code, they must code a solution and submit it to the open source community. Most enterprises do not have staff with the technical depth to do this, so they contract with an open source support service. But these support services are, for the most part, also software vendors, and as one determines the level of functionality needed to use the open source DBMS in production, in a full enterprise context, with additional scalability, performance, security, and reliability, one finds that the subscription agreement has expanded to include other code that is not open source. And the price has gone up. There is nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but if one subscribes to a different vendor's service for each DBMS, one soon has the old problem again: how to operationally integrate and optimize an application environment when each technology element is provided by a different vendor. A cleaner approach is to find a vendor that can provide support and enterprise-class functionality and features for all the databases involved across the board. The Business Benefits of Data Modernization Data modernization requires a review of the current DBMS technology. Is the incumbent RDBMS the best option in moving toward a future that is cloud based and involves a range of emerging database models and the workload types they support? These models and workload types can lead to a revolutionizing of the business and its processes, with better intelligence, better automation, faster time to market, and smarter decisions both within the organization and at the edge, but sticking with an incumbent that is not able to deliver the functionality required on the chosen cloud platform, especially where a range of database types is involved, can lead to operational difficulties. To take advantage of all the cloud has to offer, one must also have dynamic scalability as well as agility in the provisioning of compute or storage resources. Such provisioning must also deliver reliable performance and the means, through platform integration, of faster innovation. All this must be delivered automatically without operational effort on the user's part and at an affordable, predictable price. Also, many enterprises require functionality on a global scale, so the flexibility of deploying and moving workloads among availability zones around the world is critical for them. This again speaks to the need for tight integration with the underlying cloud platform and its exploitation of emerging application models such as microservices architectures.