9/11/2018 3 Ways That Hybrid Cloud for DBMS Will Drive Your Data Management Strategy

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3 Ways That Hybrid Cloud for DBMS Will Drive Your Data
Management Strategy
Published 6 June 2018 - ID G00357617 - 13 min read
By Analysts Adam Ronthal, Donald Feinberg

Supporting Key Initiative is Data Management Strategies

The majority of enterprises using cloud will be living in a hybrid deployment world for the
foreseeable future. Data and analytics leaders must understand the risks and benefits in using
the primary scenarios for hybrid cloud DBMS, and how they align with core use cases and
architectures.

Overview
Key Challenges
■ Hybrid data and analytics architectures that span cloud and on-premises environments are prevalent.

■ Architectural considerations for dealing with a hybrid database management system (DBMS) cloud
environment are neither inherently obvious nor consistent, which has financial and performance
implications for data and analytics leaders.

■ Data and analytics leaders are challenged to understand how data flows, both in volume and direction,
and how data location impacts performance, application latency, SLAs, high availability and disaster
recovery (HA/DR) strategies, and financial models in hybrid DBMS cloud scenarios.

Recommendations
For data and analytics leaders considering hybrid cloud deployments for DBMS as part of a data
management strategy:

■ Select hybrid cloud deployment architectures that align with specific use-case requirements such as
compatibility with on-premises options (if available), network latency and throughput requirements.

■ Guide your decision making on colocation of application components for hybrid cloud architectures by
monitoring data flow, in both volume and direction, between these components. Volume will impact the
expected latency and performance, while direction will impact the cost of a hybrid deployment.
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■ Adopt multicloud architectures when there is a compelling reason to do so. These may include vendor
lock-in risk mitigation, application availability or specific services that are not available in your primary
cloud provider's environment. Make sure the payoff is worth the overhead!

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2020, 75% of organizations managing their information infrastructure in the public cloud will be subject
to cloud provider lock-in, making migration of data to another provider difficult and costly.

By 2020, most data and analytics use cases will require connecting to distributed data sources, leading
enterprises to double their investments in metadata management.

By 2022, less than 5% of applications migrated to a public cloud will move back to an on-premises data
center.

Introduction
The increasing acceptance and implementation of cloud-based deployment options extends far beyond
database platform as a service (dbPaaS) considerations. Requests to Gartner's inquiry services regarding
cloud computing within the core topic of "data management strategies" increased by more than 86%
between 2016 and 2017, and are showing sustained interest in 2018. 1 (#dv_1_analysis_of) However, for
most organizations of any significant size, the existing investment in on-premises infrastructure is not so
easily abandoned.

According to Gartner's latest Analytics and BI Magic Quadrant reference survey, 41% of references are
deploying BI products in the public cloud, but 46% have no plans to deploy an enterprise data warehouse or
data lake in the cloud. 2 (#dv_2_an_online) Additionally, an average of 46% of survey respondents report
moving data from on-premises to the cloud, and an average of 21% of respondents report analyzing data
on-premises with cloud tools.

As a result, most organizations' DBMS deployments will coexist in the on-premises and cloud worlds
simultaneously — the hybrid cloud DBMS.

The term "hybrid cloud DBMS" is not generally well-understood. Vendors and cloud service providers (CSPs)
often use the term to highlight their own capabilities, which does not always tell the complete story.

In fact, there are many nuances to DBMS hybrid cloud deployments. Each is appropriate to a select set of
use cases, and each has potential performance, financial and vendor selection implications. A thorough
understanding of defined scenarios and how they impact appropriate usage is a prerequisite to embracing
hybrid cloud DBMS.

Analysis
Select Hybrid Cloud Deployment Architectures That Align With Specific Use-Case
Requirements

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Different vendors and CSPs define hybrid cloud to mean different things, according to the respective
vendors' strengths. For example, a vendor that does not offer on-premises implementations of its DBMS
software — in essence, a cloud-only vendor — will have a different viewpoint and definition of "hybrid cloud"
than a vendor that offers both on-premises and cloud deployment options. IT management, enterprise
architects and information architects must understand these nuances, and their implications.

With respect to DBMS deployments, we define four core scenarios of hybrid cloud deployments:

■ Architecture spanning

■ Use-case specific

■ Multicloud

■ Intercloud

Figure 1. Four Core Scenarios of Hybrid Cloud Deployments

DR = disaster recovery

Source: Gartner (June 2018)

Architecture Spanning
In an architecture spanning hybrid cloud model, different components of an application architecture may
reside on-premises and/or in the cloud. The DBMS might reside on-premises and the applications that
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connect to it may reside in the cloud — for example, a business intelligence (BI) dashboard application. This
also includes architectures with data residing both in the cloud and on-premises, such as the ability of the
DBMS to have some replicas, partitions or shards residing on-premises and some in the cloud for the same
database.

There are many application use cases for this kind of functionality, including:

■ Partitioning data by age, frequency of access, or geography

■ Dynamic capacity allocation to accommodate inconsistent, surge demand on resources

In an architecture spanning model, it is critical to understand the characteristics around the flow of data (for
example, whether data is flowing into the cloud or out of the cloud) and the expected volumes of data.
There may be issues with latency — that is, the time it takes to move the data between on-premises and
cloud. SLAs should be defined and tested. This may lead to a requirement of a special communications link
between the on-premises and cloud components, leading to greater financial cost implications.

For example, some cloud providers charge data transfer fees for data flowing out of their cloud, but not for
data flowing into it, while others charge for data flowing in both directions. An application architecture that
requires significant amounts of data movement from the cloud may be financially untenable. For this
reason, it is important to understand the financial implications inherent in the selected cloud provider, and to
take steps to ensure the application topology best uses the cloud features and data flow requirements.

Use-Case Specific
In a use-case-specific hybrid cloud model, components are segmented by their development life cycle
function. For example, any of the development, test, quality assurance (QA), disaster recovery (DR), or
production instances of a DBMS may reside on-premises or in the cloud. Although financial and latency
considerations remain important, in this scenario, compatibility is the primary concern. Many organizations
may not be comfortable with anything less than 100% code compatibility between the cloud and on-
premises environments, in turn limiting the CSP selection to those that can meet these rigorous
requirements.

There is a spectrum of what may be acceptable. For example, Amazon Web Services' stated goal of 100%
MySQL compatibility for Amazon Aurora for RDS may be sufficient for some information architects. Others
may want to use a dedicated QA environment (the last stage before promoting code to production) that is
identical to the target production environment, and only use the compatible MySQL environment for initial
development work.

The degree to which development organizations rely on compatibility claims will vary with their risk profiles.
There is a difference in API compatibility, which will impact how the application functions, and deployment
environment compatibility, which will always differ from cloud PaaS to on-premises. Regardless, when doing
performance testing, identical codebases and deployment architectures are required to validate the results
of any such testing.

Multicloud

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Multicloud hybrid cloud models incorporate aspects of use-case-specific hybrid cloud. The difference is, in
this scenario, services from multiple cloud providers are used. A DBMS offering may be deployed on-
premises and on one or more clouds. As such, all of the considerations of use-case-specific hybrid cloud
apply with the added considerations of deploying software in multiple cloud environments. These offerings
are typically limited to independent software vendors (ISVs) rather than native CSPs, as only the ISVs have a
vested interest in making sure their software runs in as many environments as possible.

The multicloud scenario generally appeals to those end users who are concerned about cloud vendor lock-
in and want to be able to move their applications easily to a different cloud provider, or even repatriate them
to on-premises deployments. In providing a semantically compatible offering that runs the same in multiple
clouds and on-premises, multicloud-capable DBMSs promise easier migrations as the primary concern will
be migrating the data, not rewriting the applications.

Intercloud
Intercloud hybrid cloud models may incorporate aspects of the other two hybrid cloud scenarios —
architecture spanning and use-case specific. In this scenario, not only are services from multiple cloud
providers used, but there is also intercloud communication where data is moving between two different
clouds. For example, Microsoft's PowerBI might connect to a Salesforce database residing outside of the
Azure cloud infrastructure.

Intercloud hybrid cloud models are less commonly used today. At the same time, they are increasingly of
interest to those seeking more advantageous pricing models, specific tools not available from other CSPs,
risk mitigation through the use of multiple CSPs, and to address data sovereignty requirements through
diversified data location. For example, regulatory requirements might forbid data from residing outside a
country's geographic boundaries.

Intercloud also introduces new degrees of complexity. For example, access control and identity
management may be more difficult to implement in a unified manner, and may require pushing this
functionality down to the DBMS or application level rather than relying on cloud provider services.
Additionally, the use of multiple cloud providers also adds new levels of complexity to understanding data
flow patterns and volumes, which now may include cloud-to-cloud data movement as well as cloud to on-
premises. While high-speed, reliable cloud-to-on-premises network configurations are generally obtainable
through the use of dedicated lines, the same cannot generally be said for cloud-to-cloud network
connections, which typically rely on the public internet for data transfer. Although some cloud providers can
provide dedicated cloud-to-cloud connectivity, this is not yet widely available or deployed.

Guide Your Decision Making on Colocation of Application Components by Monitoring

Data Flow Between These Components
The various hybrid DBMS cloud scenarios may not be implemented in isolation. In any enterprise moving to
the cloud, more than one or all of these scenarios may exist simultaneously. As the cloud footprint of an
organization expands to encompass the different hybrid DBMS cloud scenarios, information and application
architects will need to closely monitor and understand the implications of each one, and how they affect
application performance and latency, specific use cases like HA/DR, and even the impact of cloud brokering
services for financial arbitrage and their impact on data flow. Data will have a natural home — either in the

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cloud or on-premises, and rather than force it into an unnatural home, it should be allowed to reside in its
native environment. This concept, referred to as "data gravity," will have a strong impact on the design of
hybrid cloud architectures for data management (see "Overcome Data Gravity and the 'Heavy' Bits That
Keep Data From Moving" (https://www.gartner.com/document/code/308563?ref=grbody&refval=3877665)
).

While performance and latency concerns tend to be more easily understood, HA/DR use cases and cloud
brokering services are not. In the case of HA/DR — a common early use case for dbPaaS — all of the
concerns associated with the architecture spanning, use-case-specific, multicloud and intercloud scenarios
apply. Consider HA/DR solutions that may want to use different CSPs to mitigate risk (multicloud). These
require a solid understanding of the data latency implications of architecture spanning and are, by definition,
use-case-specific implementations. To be fully successful, they require a deep understanding of each one of
these hybrid DBMS cloud scenarios, as well as methodical, rigorous testing.

In each of the above examples, data flow — in both volume and direction — plays a critical role. Data volume
will have a direct impact on the latency of data freshness among the environments. Assessing the
feasibility of a hybrid cloud architecture from a data movement perspective should be reasonably straight
forward:

■ Estimate the amount of data moving between the on-premises and cloud components of the deployment
(this could be ground to cloud, cloud to ground, or cloud to cloud).

■ Test the data throughput between the various components.

■ Calculate the time it will take to move the data and assess if the latency is acceptable for the given use
case.

The direction of data flow will have a direct impact on financial considerations, as data leaving the cloud
may incur data transfer fees. If significant volumes of data are expected to egress the cloud, calculate the
financial impact based on the data transfer fees imposed by the CSP, and consider an unlimited data
transfer plan if the volume is sufficiently high to justify the cost.

Alternately, consider colocating the components of applications that exchange significant volumes of data
to avoid both data latency and financial deterrents.

Adopt Multicloud/Intercloud Architectures When There Is a Compelling Reason to Do

So, and Make Sure the Payoff Is Worth the Overhead!
The most obvious differences between single-cloud and a multicloud or intercloud scenario are the
differences in the native CSP product offerings available. These can be mitigated through the use of ISV
offerings that support multiple clouds, but there will almost always be situations where the native CSP
offering is used for convenience, performance or ease of integration with other components in that cloud.

Additionally, when adopting a multicloud or intercloud hybrid cloud architecture, expect compatibility
friction for auxiliary services as different cloud providers have a different range of services available, with
differing degrees of functionality.

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Finally, there will be different capabilities for monitoring, provisioning, payment and financial governance.
Different cloud infrastructure may present different performance — or, more importantly, price/performance
characteristics. Expect significant differences in the maturity and capabilities of operational tools and
controls.

Because of the added complexity, there typically needs to be a compelling reason to implement multicloud
or intercloud. This might include:

■ Specific services or functionality only available from a particular CSP

■ Availability zones or points of presence required, but not available from both providers

■ Risk management and cloud lock-in concerns

If the choice is made to use multicloud or intercloud, always run a proof of concept (POC) not only to prove
the compatibility of the capabilities and tooling, but also to show that the desired SLAs are met. The POC
must be run at the desired scale of the production system; simple testing may not show issues with latency
until scale is reached.

Evidence
1
Analysis of inquiries to Gartner's inquiry service from January 2016 through April 2018.

2
An online survey was developed and hosted by Gartner as part of its research. Each year, Gartner
evaluates the analytics and BI platform market with the ultimate objective of publishing Magic Quadrant
research that analyzes the findings. Part of this process is a large user survey of vendor-supplied references
and other organizations. This includes IT, business or hybrid IT-business leaders disclosing their
experiences with their vendor's analytics and BI products, as well as how those products have contributed
to overall business success.

The survey was conducted from 8 September 2017 through 5 October 2017. Survey results are derived from
1,526 responses. Although this is a substantive pool of responses for directional inference, vendor
reference data is not representative of the total analytics and BI market, but rather the customers that
elected to participate. The survey was developed collaboratively by a team of Gartner analysts and was
reviewed, tested and administered by Gartner's Research Data and Analytics team.

Document Revision History

Hybrid DBMS Cloud Defined, and Why You Want to Know! - 1 April 2016
(https://www.gartner.com/document/code/292365?ref=ddrec)

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New Pricing Models for Cloud DBMSs Provide Cost Optimization Opportunities
(https://www.gartner.com/document/3710617?ref=ddrec&refval=3877665)

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Separating Cloud Resources for Data Management Increases Flexibility and Helps Prevent Lock-In
(https://www.gartner.com/document/3408017?ref=ddrec&refval=3877665)

Market Guide for Database Platform as a Service (https://www.gartner.com/document/3830154?

ref=ddrec&refval=3877665)

Overcome Data Gravity and the 'Heavy' Bits That Keep Data From Moving
(https://www.gartner.com/document/3447717?ref=ddrec&refval=3877665)

Differentiating Between Amazon Web Services' Database Offerings

(https://www.gartner.com/document/3868369?ref=ddrec&refval=3877665)

Recommended For You

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