Before introducing cloud-based technologies, companies were having a set team of expert admins. Or DBAs and specialists who were working on setting up and maintaining a specific solution as chosen for the company. The administrators work closely with the developers for better management of the system. As a significant amount of money and time is investing into setting up the system, they stroke to effectively handle various workloads even when there are various options available out there.
However, as there are many other choices available in the managed solutions available on the cloud now, the role of admins is taking a metamorphosis in order to become more interesting and flexible. Unlike olden times, the administrators are now not restricting to focus on a single DBMS solution. Going beyond, they can find their jobs to be more software-centered and less into the routine hectic tasks of adding and managing hardware and provisioning those.
This is fundamental shift in enterprise administration is a very exciting thing for DBAs. Which offers them more opportunities to develop many strategic solutions by working closely with development and operations teams. So, it is a great shift for the DBAs to expand their knowledge and tune their expertise to bring forth better results. In light of this changing database administration scenario. Let us take a closer look at the changing role of modern-day DBAs and how this evaluation works out in real-time cloud-based enterprise database management use cases.
Database capacity planning
For ages, DB capacity planning had been the conventional mode of provisioning the server capacity to handle incremental loads. Most of the time, the database owners paid for the extra resources that were not utilizing in full. This was not only overhead for the users but also no flexibility. However, as cloud came into the picture, they were much elastic and can compute the capacity to scale dynamically to meet the increasing needs over time.
In such a cloud-based ecosystem, the APIs are used effectively to configure the automate responses and to monitor the alarms and metrics. Some of the cloud databases are now serverless, with which there are no virtual machines or servers to provision at all. So, literally, you are just paying for what you avail, and only for the time, you avail it. For assistance in terms of cloud-based database management, you can approach reliable remote DBA services like RemoteDBA.com.
Backing up and recovery of databases
Traditionally, the process of backing up the user to involve maintaining and storing the physical backups like disks and tapes, etc., which had to be using to restore data if there is a failure. For safety reasons, these storages were using to store at offsite locations. This was very cumbersome and difficult to manage the affair. When it comes to the cloud, there are many simpler and viable storage solutions that can automatically keep various copies of the data backup at various locations. The users do not have to maintain any storage devices, and the DBAs do not have to maintain anything. On the cloud, backup and recovery can also be automate through scripts, which saves time, cost, and recovery time.
Choosing ideal database solutions
Cloud platforms now offer many new options for the enterprise builders and admins to explore purpose-built databases ranging from self-managed, fully-managed, and hybrid DBMS. You can explore relational, non-relational, NoSQL, and NewSQL database options with variances like document, key-value pair, graph, in-memory, columnar, time-series, and so on.
For database specialists, these changes mean they need not be aware of all these choices and how to apply all the applications to deploy. For example, database specialists can simply work in coordination with the development teams to choose purpose-built database solutions that are best suited for the specific type of data and the required database access patterns to meet the needs related to performance, scalability, durability, etc. at a lowered cost.
Knowing how to effectively map the application requirements in light of the exact requirements for scale and performance. Database admins can easily choose an appropriate cloud-based solution and run it instantly. The entire database administration becomes much of a fun affair for the administrator. With a lot of solutions to choose from.
Designing database Workload
With the fundamental shift to managing cloud services, there is only a limited need for database admins. It spend most of their time performing routine management tasks like maintaining, patching, installing, and upgrading the engines. The DBAs can now be more consultative in terms of assisting the developers. Just to explore the right database service to handle a specific workload. And only need to perform a limited set of admin tasks to run it.
Compared to the old-generation database administrators, new DBAs are much more encouraged to leverage. The benefits of continued education and upskilling their expertise. When it comes to database management, there are many accreditations and certifications which they can avail to upgrade. Based on the industry trends and changing technological innovations. There are many accreditations like Oracle, AWS, etc., which offer extending resources, training programs, and skillset to gain. In order to avail of these, all of what database admins need is to learn to choose the right database. And then validate the expertise gained through these accreditations.
Opportunities for the database administrators are having a wide-range impact now on the organization than ever before. There is an increasing volume of data and databases to support end-to-end enterprise management. From improving sales to business decision making and forecasting, etc.
Database administration is a mission-critical role in enterprise administration, which offers many rewarding opportunities too. At all possibilities, database administrators and database administration’s scope seems to increase; however, the workload and complexity in terms of database management are getting lower. So, the DBA’s need to be aware of these fundamental shifts in database environments to cloud. And must be prepare and knowledgeable to be in-line with this shift and adapt to it without a lag.