Effortlessly Journey to the Cloud with AWS DMS Serverless

I’m absolutely thrilled to bring your attention to a new announcement by AWS. They’ve just launched a serverless version of the AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) called AWS DMS Serverless! This new service aims to simplify and streamline your migration process to the cloud, making it an absolute breeze.

In the era of Big Data, more and more organizations are migrating their databases to the cloud. Cloud-based databases offer several advantages, including enhanced security, high reliability, and excellent performance. But migrating to the cloud can be a daunting task, requiring significant time, resources, and planning, especially for determining the required capacity for the migration. Even after starting the migration process, you must continuously monitor usage and manually adjust capacity to ensure optimal performance. But now, with AWS DMS Serverless, these challenges are significantly reduced.

A New Era with AWS DMS Serverless

AWS DMS Serverless is designed to simplify the migration process by automatically setting up, scaling, and managing migration resources. This means you no longer have to worry about figuring out the necessary computing resources for your migration or managing the operational aspects of the migration. AWS DMS Serverless takes care of it all for you, automatically provisioning capacity, scaling, and optimizing the migration. This means you can start your migration quickly and with minimal oversight.

At its launch, AWS DMS Serverless supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle as data sources. On the other side, AWS DMS Serverless supports a broad range of databases and analytics services as data targets, including Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, and more. This versatility means that AWS DMS Serverless can be used in many scenarios, from migrating databases to building modern data strategies by synchronizing ongoing data replications into data lakes or warehouses from multiple, possibly disparate data sources.

A Walkthrough of AWS DMS Serverless

If you’re interested in how AWS DMS Serverless works, let’s walk through a quick example. Let’s say we’re migrating data from a PostgreSQL database to a MySQL database running on Amazon RDS.

The first step is to set up the required resources, like creating a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and defining the source and target endpoints. Then, you can create a replication by selecting the “Create replication” button on the Serverless replications page. The replication process has been designed to be intuitive and straightforward in AWS DMS Serverless, eliminating the complexities of instances and tasks that you would typically have to manage in standard AWS DMS.

When setting up the replication, you can choose from three types: Full load, Change data capture (CDC), or a combination of both. For our example, we chose Full load and CDC as we want to migrate the existing data and replicate any data changes from the source to the target database.

Another useful feature is the ability to enable logging with Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy to monitor the replication progress over time. You can also configure Selection rules in Table mappings to define filters for replication from table columns in the source data store. Use Transformation rules if you need to rename a schema or table or add a prefix or suffix to a schema or table.

In the Capacity section, you can set the range for the required capacity to perform replication by defining the minimum and maximum DMS Capacity Units (DCU). AWS DMS Serverless uses this range to scale up and down based on CPU utilization, connections, and available memory, ensuring efficient resource use and cost savings.

Once the replication is configured, you select “Create replication.” After the replication is created, you can start the process and monitor its progress over time. AWS DMS Serverless also offers a CloudWatch metric called Capacity utilization, which shows how the capacity is being used to run replication within the defined minimum and maximum DCU range. When the replication finishes its process, you’ll see the capacity start to decrease, indicating that AWS DMS Serverless successfully scaled up to the required capacity and scaled-down within the range you defined, which is a testament to its efficiency.

Finally, all you need to do is verify whether your data has been successfully replicated into the target data store. You can do this by connecting to the target, running a select query, and checking if all data has been successfully replicated from the source.

Availability

AWS DMS Serverless is now available in all commercial regions where standard AWS DMS is available. You can start using it today for your cloud migration needs. You can refer to the AWS DMS Serverless page for more details about its benefits, use cases, how to get started, and pricing details.

In conclusion, with the introduction of AWS DMS Serverless, AWS has once again proven its dedication to making the cloud journey as easy and efficient as possible. By taking away the guesswork of capacity planning and handling operational burdens, AWS DMS Serverless allows you to focus on what matters most - your business. So, if you’ve been thinking about migrating to the cloud, now is the perfect time to take that leap with AWS DMS Serverless!