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CHAPTER 4
Conclusion
For many years after Amazon.com opened the first major cloud offering,
the trade press presented the question facing system administrators
and DBAs as "Cloud or not cloud?" Soon, on-premises clouds and
hybrid offerings joined pure cloud solutions as options to consider. But
the choices were always more complicated. As this report has shown,
offerings have multiplied rapidly. DBAs must simultaneously evaluate
databases along all the following axes:
• Third-party vendor, on-premises, or hybrid
• Relational or one of the many nonrelational varieties
• Managed or self-managed
• Cloud native (e.g., Amazon Aurora) or cross-platform (e.g., MySQL)
• Whether to take advantage of performance enhancements such
as solid-state drives or caches
• Physical locations of cloud regions and availability zones
• Ease of migration
• Relevant skills needed and possessed by your staff
• Other aspects of vendor support and reputation
It is not a good idea to prematurely tie yourself to a choice in one area
before looking at all options. It can well be that you can save a lot
of money and improve customer experience by taking on some extra
training or making a leap into an unfamiliar technology.