Do You Need a DBA for Databases in the Cloud?

 The changing role of the database administrator in the “Cloud Era.”

Cloud providers take away pain. Failed disk drives are someone else’s problem.  Server provisioning is done with a few clicks in a management portal.  When you use virtualized servers in the cloud your IT staff spends less time running down hardware problems than they once did.  It’s reasonable to wonder if similar benefits arise from moving databases to the cloud. In particular, do you still need a database administrator when your database is in the cloud? 

The short answer is yes.  A slightly longer answer is yes but your DBA’s responsibilities will likely change.

Let’s start by reviewing what a database administrator does.  For starters, a DBA is often the first person you talk with about sizing a new database server.  The last thing you want for your new application is a database server that cannot meet demand. DBAs install and configure relational database software. If you have never done this, count yourself among the lucky.  The more functional relation database software become, the more difficult it became to install correctly.  DBAs became well versed in understanding dependencies, debugging installation failures, and determining which packages are really required and which you could live without. 

Once the software was in place, DBAs configure databases specific to an organization’s needs. This can entail a wide range of tasks from determining an optimal block size for reading and writing chunks of data to disk to setting parameters for parallel processing operations.  When applications are in place, DBAs are there to monitor performance and diagnose query performance problems.   Enterprise databases can store large volumes of private and confidential data. Keeping it private and confidential is not a trivial task. DBAs are essential to implementing and maintaining database security practices.

When you move your database to the cloud you may find a few different options, depending on if you move your database to an infrastructure cloud (IaaS) or start using a database provided as a service.  In cases where you decide to maintain maximum control over your database, but with some of the advantages of a cloud, then the IaaS option is probably best. In this case you don’t have to spend as much time estimating growth of the load on the database. You can start with one size virtual server and when it is no longer sufficient you can move your database software to a larger instance. 

This could be as simple as starting a machine image with your installed and configured database software, but you may want to tune your configuration with additional processors or memory (this is a good task for a DBA).  Sizing a database properly is still important but making accurate predictions about growth is less problematic when you are not stuck for three years with the server you pick at the start of the project.

Storage tuning is less of an issue in the cloud as well. You do not have to optimize placement of tablespace files to optimize read and write operations at the physical device level.  Instead, you can allocate storage from a cloud provider’s storage service. As part of that service, you are relieved from attending to low level details about the distribution of I/O operations and replication.

Running your database in the cloud, either on IaaS or PaaS services, will relieve your DBA of some of the typical tasks he or she has dealt with over the years.  Fortunately for them, there is still plenty to do.  The role of DBAs will shift up the value chain from infrastructure oriented tasks to application analysis and support tasks.

Dan Sullivan is an author, systems architect, and consultant with over 20 years of IT experience with engagements in systems architecture, enterprise security, advanced analytics and business intelligence. He has worked in a broad range of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, software development, government, retail, gas and oil production, power generation, life sciences, and education.  Dan has written 16 books and numerous articles and white papers about topics ranging from data warehousing, Cloud Computing and advanced analytics to security management, collaboration, and text mining.

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