by Paul Allen
At Cornell, as engineers contemplate moving infrastructure and applications to AWS it is tempting to ask whether they can start just by moving database instances to the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) and leaving other application components on premise. The reasons behind this probably stem from the fact that the on-premise relational databases represent a very well-defined component with well-defined connectivity to other components. And, tools like the AWS Database Migration Service promise to make the move fairly painless.
So, how feasible is it to leave applications on campus while using an RDS database as a back end? When I queried the Cornell cloud community about this, I got several anecdotal responses that this had been tried, without much success, with web applications.