Oracle has long been a top choice for relational databases—but migrating those workloads to the cloud requires a lot more effort than a simple lift and shift. Oracle databases are typically large and complex, so if you’re looking to migrate to the cloud, you’ll need to take into consideration everything from architectural changes and database upgrades to consolidation, license portability and migration downtime.
You may want to migrate or replace Oracle for one or more reasons:
- If you have midsize to large Oracle database servers
- If you’re using out of date or out of support and consequently at-risk on-premises hardware
- If you’re over-provisioned on Oracle hardware (without using or without benefiting from Oracle hardware, also known as “Oracle Engineered Systems”)
- If it’s a relatively small footprint compared to other services moving into Google Cloud
- If you’re not using RAC (or can possibly simplify your Oracle databases and reduce costs by removing the RAC option)
- For AI/ML, IoT and other cloud services
- To simplify your IT environment with other Google Cloud managed database services
- To integrate new technologies that can drive innovation
Whatever your reasons, you may feel overwhelmed at the thought of moving this incredibly complex (and expensive) environment into the cloud. And you may think your only real option is to move to Oracle’s Cloud.
But with the emergence of Google’s Bare Metal Solution (BMS) and cloud-native open source databases, Google BMS or Postgres Cloud SQL services are viable destinations for Oracle cloud migrations, offering SLA-based solutions to protect your applications and reduce database management.
Looking for more reasons to consider migrating to Google Cloud? We’ve got you covered with benefits, migrations scenarios and real-world success stories in our Google Cloud Migration Handbook. Download your copy today.
Choose your way forward
There are three primary migration strategies for Oracle on Google Cloud: rehost with Bare Metal Solution (BMS); re-platform with Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL; or rewrite with Cloud Spanner.
Bare Metal Solution
Rehost: Bare Metal Solution includes an interconnect to the rest of Google Cloud. With this option, you have the ability to provision bare metal infrastructure using Oracle-certified hardware via regional extensions connected to Google Cloud by a managed, high-performance connection and low-latency network fabric. That means, with the help of a Google Cloud Partner, you can lift and shift your Oracle workloads into the cloud with minimal risk and change.
Benefits: You can provision infrastructure using Oracle-certified hardware, with faster migration times due to no application rewrites and maintaining the familiarity of using your current stack.
Challenges: If you have a massive source Oracle Database, then server sizing and configuration could be a challenge, possibly involving operating system changes and/or database upgrades.
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL
Re-platform: If you’re looking to reduce your licensing fees and maintenance costs while keeping your core database capabilities, then consider a cloud-native open source database such as Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. It’s a fully managed relational database service that allows you to set up, maintain, manage and administer PostgreSQL relational databases on Google Cloud with out-of-the-box high availability, replication, encryption and automatic storage increases. And you can offload analytics-centric workloads to data warehousing solutions like BigQuery.
Benefits: By adopting open source database technologies, you can reduce your reliance on a single database vendor, modernize your database architecture and lower your TCO.
Challenges: It can be difficult to completely eliminate vendor lock-in, and it could affect application support down the road.
Cloud Spanner
Rewrite: If you need a relational database with global reach and scalability, consider cloud-native database Cloud Spanner, which provides a high-availability SLA of 99.999%. It’s an enterprise-grade, globally distributed database service built specifically for the cloud that combines the benefits of a relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scaling.
Benefits: You’ll gain horizontal scaling without migration from relational to NoSQL databases, and you’ll be able to focus on app logic instead of spending time managing hardware and software.
Challenges: You’ll most likely need to rewrite or redesign your application architecture to fit with Cloud Spanner’s feature set, and data migration can be tricky. In spite of the challenges, customers see a huge benefit in using Google Cloud services in managing and using data more efficiently for various business use cases.
Migrate with confidence
No matter which migration strategy you choose, a detailed assessment will help you understand not only the complexity of effort required, but the value you’ll receive from migrating.
With Pythian, you’ll maximize your investment with our 25 years of experience in managing the world’s most complex Oracle systems. And as a premier Google Cloud and Specialization Partner, we provide end-to-end consulting services for all Google Cloud solutions.
Find out more about the unique considerations of Oracle to Google Cloud migrations in our on-demand webinar.
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