Azure Database Migration Service Features and Pricing

The concept of Database Migration Services has evolved to perform homogeneous migration. There are several such services available in the market that helps user organizations to perform seamless migration from their on-premises platform to the cloud database platforms. Apart from this advantage, the database Migration services provide some other benefits. These can be categorized in the following manner:-

• Simple migration – These services act as a simple migration tool and aid the users to have a single integrated experience while performing premises database migration.
• Minimum downtime – The process of data replication during the migration process from source to destination can be completed with minimal application downtime.
• Operational benefits – The Database Migration services provide the required stability and security to organizational data that user companies demand in the contemporary market.

In this context, the Azure Database Migration Service is one of the most popular Database Migration services (DMS) in the market. The tools help to simplify, guide, and automate Database Migration with comprehensive security to the organizational data.

What is Azure Database Migration Service and it’s benefits:

The Azure DMS is a fully managed Microsoft cloud service. It enables the user to migrate databases or the data warehouses from the on-premises or other cloud platforms to the Azure platform. The benefits of this service include the following:-

• The service provides both homogenous migrations as well as heterogeneous migrations.
• Users can easily move data, objects and schema.
• The user can perform a pre-migration assessment to discover any issues that may hinder the performance of the service.
• The procedure is easy which makes it user friendly.
• It is cost-effective as well as provides desired outcomes with less downtime.

Azure Database Migration Service Pricing Structure:

The Azure Database Migration Service is also termed as DMS. It is a completely managed service, designed by Microsoft for usage in both operational databases as well as data warehouse migrations. The Pricing structure can be categorized into the following parts:-

• Standard Pricing Tier
• Premium Pricing Tier

The Standard Pricing Tier has the capacity of supporting both Online Migrations as well as Offline Migration. This tier provides 1-,2- and 4-vCore options that are available to the customers and are free of cost.

The Premium Pricing Tier also supports Offline migrations and Online migrations for business-critical workloads that need very little downtime. Online migrations are also called continuous migrations.

The Azure DMS Pricing range can be described in the following tabular format:-

DMS Standard Compute –

Usually small to medium enterprise workloads support offline migration only. The compute resources are provisioned in the form of virtual cores, abbreviated as vCore. The vCore represents a logical CPU.

DMS Premium Compute –

Generally, large or business-critical workloads support online migrations, offline migrations with faster Migration speeds. The provisioning of computing is done with vCores or virtual cores.

Automating DMS:

The features in the Azure Database Migration Pricing structure provide the user with a completely managed assistance providing migration tool to migrate data from the on-premises platforms to the Azure Database platforms. This service can be used to migrate any kind of database, data type, or migration type. The process of automating the database migration service can be completed through the PowerShell commandlets. A command is a light command which is used within the PowerShell environment. In the PowerShell runtime, these commandlets are invoked in the context of automation scripts which are provided in the command line.

The process of migrating data from the on-premises platform to the cloud database platforms will involve various kinds of steps. It is based on the data source and the destination database. In general, before migrating from the on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Database, the user company needs to have Azure virtual machines for the Azure Database Migration Service. The complete process can be summarized in the following manner:-

• Assessing whether the on-premise data contains issues that can hinder the successful migration of data.
• Migrating schema using DMA after eliminating all the issues.
• Register the Micros oft. data migration resource provider in the Azure Portal.
• Creating an Azure Data Migration Service instance.
• Creating a migration project in the Database Migration Service console.
• Running migration and monitoring the process to ensure successful data transfer.

What are the main features in the Azure Database Migration Service:

The following are the features of the Azure Database Migration Service:-

• The service performs a one-time migration process using a database sensitive migration that moves data to the cloud through simple procedures. These involve the moving of data, schemas and objects to the Azure cloud through continuous data replication.
• The easily understandable procedure makes it user friendly to a great extent.
• Database Migration Service supports important migration scenarios including the SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and others.
• It is a migration process with high resilience and self-healing features that provide reliable outcomes with minimal downtime.

Checking Migration Readiness and Database Destination:

To simplify the migration process of on-premise databases to the Azure SQL Database, the user company needs to first prepare the enterprise workloads before moving them to Azure. The process of Azure migration planning involves a range of Azure Migration tools. It includes Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, Strategic Migration Assessment, and Readiness Tool, and Cloud Migration Checklist. This process of preparing databases includes the following steps:-

• Using Azure Migrate to discover the on-premises data estate
• Assessing the Readiness for data migration and
• Finally, choosing the suitable destination for the databases.

The method of using the Azure Migrate to determine the Database Readiness involves an array of features provided in the tool. These can be enumerated in the following manner:-

• Supporting important migration scenarios across various servers, databases and web applications – This implies that a comprehensive approach can be employed in migrating the databases to destinations like the Virtual Machines in Azure, Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database and others.
• Guided experience – The end to end visibility feature in Azure Migrate can guide the user through the process of discovering, assessing and migrating various phases of the source database.
• Cost management – These services are also considered as cost management services as these provide the efficient migration procedure included with the subscription of the Azure Database Migration Service Pricing range at no additional costs.

Data Security in Azure Database Migration:

The Azure Database Migration Service Pricing range includes comprehensive security and compliance features. These features are one of the distinctive advantages of working with Azure tools and services. There is a range of facts that depict the dedication Microsoft has towards providing adequate security to the organizational data of the user companies. These can be iterated in the following manner:-

• To begin with, Microsoft invests more than USD1 Billion yearly towards the cybersecurity, research and development branch.
• Secondly, there are over 3,500 security experts employed within the company to work towards strengthening the data security and privacy structure offered through various Azure services including the Azure Database Migration Service.
• The Azure platform has multiple compliance certifications in comparison to the other cloud providers in the market.
• There exist several built-in levels of control within the Azure platform. They are present across the processes of identity, data, networking and other applications. The cloud-native security information provided by the Azure Security Center in the form of deep insights helps the user company to receive continuous data security.
• The compliance with regulations is higher than the other competitors in the market. It is because of which the data security in the on-premises data estate cannot be compared to the security provided in the Azure cloud.

This implies the fact that the Azure DMS can not only tackle cloud workloads related to data migration, it can also provide better data security than the other public clouds.

EPC Group and Azure Consultation:

Microsoft Azure consists of a plethora of cloud-based services and tools. These tools can provide a certain organization with the much-needed flexibility and freedom to perform analytics on the go. The EPC Group consists of a group of dedicated experts who intend to provide round-the-clock consulting services related to Microsoft Azure. Microsoft being the market leader offers several tools and services that tackle cloud workloads for user organizations. But, the deployment and integration of these tools can be a tedious process, giving rise to certain issues which require thorough solutions.

In this context, the EPC Group is one of the leading IT consultants in the market which has the focus of providing organizations with the necessary assistance while using tools related to cloud databases. The firm has over two decades of experience in providing consultation to its clients and helping them through the process of developing advanced analytics systems. Being a gold certified partner of Microsoft the EPC Group has the potential of customized training programs for their clients according to their organizational needs and help them in the process of performing seamless migrations.

Conclusion:

The features in the Azure Database Migration Service Pricing range provide the user with the advantage of migrating data from on-premises platforms or other cloud platforms into Azure through a hassle-free method which can save time and help the organization to increase its productivity by tackling enterprise workloads in the cloud platform

Fill In The Form For – FREE 30 Mins Consulting For Azure Database Migration