Evaluating cloud database migration options using workload models

Martyn Ellison*, Radu Calinescu, Richard F. Paige

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

A key challenge in porting enterprise software systems to the cloud is the migration of their database. Choosing a cloud provider and service option (e.g., a database-as-a-service or a manually configured set of virtual machines) typically requires the estimation of the cost and migration duration for each considered option. Many organisations also require this information for budgeting and planning purposes. Existing cloud migration research focuses on the software components, and therefore does not address this need. We introduce a two-stage approach which accurately estimates the migration cost, migration duration and cloud running costs of relational databases. The first stage of our approach obtains workload and structure models of the database to be migrated from database logs and the database schema. The second stage performs a discrete-event simulation using these models to obtain the cost and duration estimates. We implemented software tools that automate both stages of our approach. An extensive evaluation compares the estimates from our approach against results from real-world cloud database migrations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6
JournalJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications (JoCCASA)
Volume7
Issue number1
Early online date15 Mar 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2018

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s). 2018

Keywords

  • Cloud migration
  • Database modelling
  • Enterprise systems
  • Model-driven engineering

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