Voice of the DBA

Tag: cloud

  • Webinar: The Cloud, the Future, and Bob Ward at the Summit

    I’m doing a webinar next week with Bob Ward, a principal architect for Microsoft working on Azure and SQL Server. I’ve had the chance to work with Bob quite a few times over the years, and I’m honored that I get to host a webinar with him.

    He has spent the last couple years doing a number of pre-con talks on SQL Server 2022 and how it integrates into a modern application. This year he has a pre-con on Monday at the Summit that looks at how you take your skills and move them to the cloud, with some hands-on experience in Azure. It’s not designed to sway you to Azure, but help you decide if it makes sense for your situation.

    It’s a great opportunity to learn about the Cloud and how it works. In the webinar, we’ll discuss some of the concepts and rational for considering the cloud as part of your future career.

    You can register here for our webinar next week. It’s Monday, Sep 18, at noon Eastern time.

  • Finding Analogies with AI

    I saw this article on using AI to help that included a few prompts. I decided to try one.

    This is part of a series of experiments with the ChatGPT and other AI systems. Lots of Copilot lately.

    The Prompt

    Here’s what I wrote, since I was reading piece on cloud migration and writing an editorial:

    I am currently learning about cloud migration. Convert the key lessons from this topic into engaging stories and metaphors to aid my memorization

    The Response

    1. The Cloud Island Adventure:

    Imagine your business as a group of settlers on a remote island. They’ve been working with outdated tools and limited resources, making progress slow and inefficient. One day, they hear about a magical cloud island that’s full of modern technology, abundant resources, and a vibrant community.

    The settlers decide to embark on a journey to this cloud island, symbolizing your migration to the cloud. As they arrive, they realize they can instantly access powerful tools, scalable resources, and connect with experts from various fields. Just like in cloud migration, your business gains flexibility and efficiency, leaving behind the struggles of managing on-premises infrastructure.

    Key Lesson: Cloud migration is like moving to a new land of opportunity, where you can harness advanced tools and resources to grow your business.

    2. The Cloud Highway Construction:

    Think of your business as a growing city with a bustling population. However, the existing roads and bridges are becoming congested and outdated, hindering growth and causing delays. To expand and flourish, the city planners decide to build a futuristic cloud highway.

    This cloud highway represents your migration to the cloud. Construction crews work tirelessly to build this highway, which is scalable, adaptable, and has lanes for various services. As businesses start using the highway, traffic flows smoothly, and they can easily scale up or down as needed. The old congested roads symbolize the limitations of on-premises systems, while the cloud highway signifies the ease of scalability and innovation in the cloud.

    Key Lesson: Cloud migration is like building a high-speed highway that allows your business to easily adapt, grow, and efficiently navigate the digital landscape.

    3. The Cloud Carnival:

    Envision your business as a traditional carnival that’s been running for years. The carnival’s attractions are fixed in place, and changing or upgrading them is difficult and time-consuming. Visitors are getting bored, and the carnival is losing its charm.

    Deciding to modernize, the carnival organizers pack up and move to a new location, which represents migrating to the cloud. In this new location, they can easily set up and tear down attractions, experiment with new games, and respond quickly to changing trends. The cloud becomes their dynamic playground, allowing them to create delightful experiences for visitors.

    Key Lesson: Cloud migration is like relocating a carnival to a space where you can easily innovate and provide fresh, exciting experiences to your customers.

    4. The Cloud Puzzle Factory:

    Imagine your business as a puzzle factory, creating intricate puzzles with limited resources and machinery. You’re tasked with making bigger and more complex puzzles, but the factory’s machinery is old and cannot keep up with the demand.

    To overcome this challenge, you decide to move the factory to a cloud-powered puzzle factory. Here, you have access to state-of-the-art machines that can quickly produce even the most complex puzzles. You can rent additional machines when needed and return them when the demand decreases. The cloud puzzle factory allows you to efficiently meet demand without being limited by physical constraints.

    Key Lesson: Cloud migration is like upgrading your puzzle factory to a cloud-powered version, where you can easily scale resources to meet demand and improve production efficiency.

    By associating these engaging stories and metaphors with the key lessons of cloud migration, you’ll find it easier to remember and apply these concepts in your learning journey.

    Thoughts

    I liked these analogies. They got me thinking about how to explain things to customers, though they are all positive and don’t represent the downsides. However, when I asked to alter this to show how this hinders progress, I got the result below.

    Very interesting. Not sure if I think this is that helpful, but it was thought provoking.

    1. The Stagnant Island Settlement:

    Picture a group of settlers who refuse to leave their old, resource-scarce island. They struggle with outdated tools and limited resources, but they’re unwilling to explore the nearby cloud island that offers modern technology and abundant resources.

    As time goes on, the settlers fall behind in their development. They can’t innovate or expand due to their lack of access to advanced tools and resources. The once-promising settlement becomes stagnant and isolated, symbolizing the limitations of staying on-premises instead of migrating to the cloud.

    Key Lesson: Choosing not to migrate to the cloud can lead to stagnation and missed opportunities, as your business remains bound by outdated tools and restricted growth.

    2. The Congested Road City:

    Imagine a bustling city that stubbornly refuses to build a modern cloud highway. The existing roads and bridges are constantly congested, causing delays, frustration, and hampering the city’s growth.

    As more businesses and people move in, the traffic situation worsens. Without the scalability and adaptability of a cloud highway, the city’s infrastructure can’t handle the increased demand. This congestion and lack of flexibility mirror the challenges of sticking with traditional on-premises systems.

    Key Lesson: Failing to migrate to the cloud can result in congestion and inefficiency, preventing your business from scaling and responding effectively to changing demands.

    3. The Stagnant Carnival Grounds:

    Consider a carnival that’s stuck in its old location, unable to adapt to changing times. The attractions become outdated, and visitors start losing interest. Despite the need for innovation, the organizers resist moving to a cloud-enabled carnival.

    As a result, the carnival fails to attract new visitors and struggles to create exciting experiences. The reluctance to embrace the cloud leads to a decline in customer satisfaction and revenue, as the competition adopts modern approaches.

    Key Lesson: Not migrating to the cloud can result in a decline in customer engagement and revenue, as your business fails to adapt to changing market demands and deliver innovative experiences.

    4. The Inefficient Puzzle Factory:

    Visualize a puzzle factory that clings to its old machines and refuses to transition to a cloud-powered system. The factory can’t keep up with the demand for larger and more complex puzzles, leading to delays and frustrated customers.

    Without the ability to scale resources on demand, the factory struggles to meet production goals. The reluctance to modernize impedes efficiency and profitability, as competitors who utilize cloud resources outpace them.

    Key Lesson: Neglecting cloud migration can lead to production inefficiencies and missed business opportunities, as your organization struggles to scale and respond to market needs.

    By exploring these scenarios that depict the hindrances of not moving to the cloud, you can gain a better understanding of the potential pitfalls and disadvantages of staying with traditional, on-premises systems.

  • Cloud First Software

    Watching the evolution of SQL Server and the Azure SQL Database (ASD) variant has been interesting across the last decade. For a long time, ASD felt crippled compared to the on-premises product. The last few years, however, it seems that ASD is getting features first, which then slip into a release that I can download and run locally. It’s a cloud-first database now, even though there isn’t parity with both products.

    In my career, I’ve worked with a number of platforms in production environments. One of those is Db2, though that’s often felt like a legacy platform. I’ve rarely seen users starting new projects on Db2, though they might add some new databases, especially on AS/400, mainframe, or Linux platforms. I never thought Db2 was less capable than other choices, but I just don’t see it used very often.

    There’s an article that notes IBM is moving to a cloud-first version of Db2, where there will be a cloud version coming first, then “traditional” releases. I assume this means a model similar to ASD and SQL Server, which makes sense. It’s much quicker to develop and deploy to the cloud, and test things behind feature flags with a limited audience. Those items that work well can then be bundled up for a versioned release on-premises.

    I don’t know that I think Db2 will gain a lot of market share beyond what it has with this announcement, but it does make me think this is the model that a lot of companies will adopt if they even sell software for download. Most companies seem to want to move to a SaaS (software as a service) model where they can “rent” you access to code rather than deal with the struggles of supporting an install on your machine with who-knows-what configuration.

    I get why this is attractive to companies. I also get the struggles of consumers. For some things, sure, I’ll rent access. Music makes sense. Some software makes sense, but others worry me. Already I can see that companies that control the data, and its format, might be poor choices for consumers. If I don’t like your software, can I still get whatever data I have stored with you? Is there any way to port this to another system?

    I don’t want to see regulations deciding how data and software should be implemented, but I would like to see some contract requirements with consumers that ensure the ability to leave a platform. Companies ought to be required to provide a way to extract out data into a common format, allowing me to move my pictures, tax data, sales records, health data, etc. to a new provider if I choose.

    This is often easy to do in databases, and many people know how to extract data. The harder problem becomes when higher-level vendors, those building applications, want to use proprietary formats. I don’t mind that, but I do mind not being able to extract my data if I choose.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Custom SQL Server on RDS

    One of the challenges in moving to the cloud is achieving a similar level of performance to what you would get with dedicated hardware on-premises. The cloud is someone else’s computer, and you are limited to the choices that the vendors allow you to rent. In many cases, you might even share the physical hardware resources with other customers, though many cloud providers have started to allow dedicated hardware reservations in the last few years.

    One of the challenges of choosing a PaaS cloud database platform is that there are often restrictions that differ from a similar platform on-premises. This is often to ensure that one customer doesn’t affect another, or that customers don’t make changes that might prevent the vendor from supporting the system. Azure SQL Database gives us a database only, no instance features, though we do see a virtual master database.

    AWS, however, is changing its RDS offering to allow customers to customize their database software. They started with Oracle and then added SQL Server. For the SQL Server offering, they will let you not only change the instance config with things like CLR and install drivers in the host OS. They’ll continue to manage the overall service, and handle backups, DR, etc. You can focus on your database, but if you have special configuration needs, you can set them up.

    This is a nice evolution of the cloud by giving customers more control and meeting their needs, but not forcing them to handle everything. While a lot of technologists don’t think the OS adds a burden to a DBA, I’d disagree. I think the popularity of RDS and Azure SQL Managed Instance show that a lot of customers feel the way I do. Paying for a service to be managed is valuable, and it allows your staff to focus on more helpful tasks, like performance tuning, finding data quality issues, etc.

    Of course, your staff has to take advantage of that extra time. I see plenty of companies that don’t culturally change how they work with their systems, and that means that a lot of the benefits the cloud offers aren’t being seen by the company.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.