Issue link: https://resources.awscloud.com/i/1496553
September 2020, IDC #US46773920 White Paper Breaking Free from On-Premises Constraints: Cloud Database Services from AWS Sponsored by: Amazon Web Services Carl W. Olofson September 2020 IN THIS WHITE PAPER As enterprises contemplate the move to the cloud, they are confronted with a major challenge: what to do with legacy systems. IDC research has found that "lift and shift" approaches, involving redeploying databases and applications in the cloud through virtual machines, are often cost prohibitive, but more importantly, they inhibit users from taking full advantage of the flexibility and elastic scalability of the cloud. As a consequence, some sort of migration to a more cloud-native architecture is the better option. At the same time, one may want to consider moving from a general-purpose DBMS to a more purpose-built DBMS. This white paper examines the implications of this option, especially from a database perspective, and investigates the opportunity it represents to do something new and ultimately more in keeping with the long-range goals of the enterprise by embracing new database architectures in the cloud. It also considers the cloud database services of Amazon Web Services (AWS), showing how they may offer a way forward in this regard. SITUATION OVERVIEW A big wave of technical change is heading toward most enterprises as they engage in digital transformation with an eye toward moving to the cloud. These enterprises have been using proprietary relational DBMSs (RDBMSs) in their datacenters for 30 years or more and have felt constrained by the lack of flexibility in deployment and the ongoing cost of license and maintenance fees. As enterprises make plans to move database workloads to the cloud, they must necessarily ask these questions: ▪ Will our current DBMS meet our data management needs moving forward, or should we consider something else? ▪ What new or different data management challenges will we face that our current DBMS cannot address? ▪ Would a cloud-native DBMS, one that can leverage all the features of the desired cloud platform, be preferable to a DBMS that is less well integrated? ▪ Does our current relationship with our DBMS vendor serve our best interests, or is it time for a change? The established workloads of relational databases, particularly in the online transaction processing (OLTP) realm, will remain relevant, and the RDBMSs, or other RDBMSs like them, will continue to fulfill that role, albeit in the cloud rather than on premises. On the other hand, there are application areas where a change is necessary. In this regard, many enterprises are also looking at DBMSs with well-established APIs that