Quickly shift data to Google Cloud with Database Migration Service

Migration to the cloud is a complex process with many moving parts and persons involved including a network administrator to account for infrastructure and security requirements like VPN. Most database administrators (DBAs) know that one of the largest risks of migrating a database is downtime which often prevents companies from taking on the heavy task. Typically you shut down the application, create a backup of the current database schema, perform all required update operations using migration tools, restart the application and hope that everything works fine.

However, that changes if you can’t accept any downtime. PostgreSQL users, for example, often have very large databases, meaning they are facing hours of downtime which for most companies isn’t realistic.

Database Migration Service (DMS) makes it easy for you to migrate your data to Google Cloud. It’s a fully managed service that helps you lift and shift your MySQL and PostgreSQL workloads into Cloud SQL. You can migrate from on-premises, self-hosted in Google Cloud or from another cloud and get a direct path to unlocking the benefits of Cloud SQL. The focus of DMS is to manage the migration of your database schema, metadata and the data itself. It streamlines the networking workflow, manages the initial snapshot and ongoing replication, provides a status of the migration operation and supports one-time and continuous migrations. This lets you cut over with minimal downtime.

Three main features of DMS

1. With DMS, you get a simple, integrated experience to guide you through every step of the migration (not just a combination of tools to perform the assessment and migration).
   
   
2. It’s serverless. You don’t need to deploy, manage, or monitor instances that run the migration. The onus of deciding on appropriate sizing, monitoring the instance, ensuring that compute / storage are sufficient is on Google Cloud. Serverless migrations eliminate surprises and are performant at scale.
   
   
3. It’s free.

MySQL

Supported source databases:

• AWS RDS 5.6, 5.7, 8.0
• Self-managed (on-prem, on any cloud VM) 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 8.0
• Cloud SQL 5.6, 5.7, 8.0
• Amazon Aurora 5.6, 5.7

Supported destination databases:

• Cloud SQL for MySQL 5.6, 5.7, 8.0
• PostgreSQL

Supported source databases:

• RDS 9.6.10+, 10.5+, 11.1+, 12
• Self-managed (on-prem, on any cloud VM) 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 10, 11, 12, 13

Supported destination databases:

• PostgreSQL

Check out the video below where you get to see how DMS works and how to prepare Postgres instances for migration.