MySQL managed instance in the cloud:

Organizations planning to switch to cloud often find a suite of small scale monitoring applications that need to be migrated to the cloud. These are small applications typically persisting state in a MySQL backend store. Among the choices that they have, they include are re-host, re-platform or re-architect.

Monitoring applications are usually written with the intent to monitor resources continuously, catch issues before they become a bottleneck for the operations, understand what is going on and why and prepare contingency plans beforehand.

A simple sample monitoring application when deployed to a public cloud has the following topology usually. It has entry-points via a load balancer for the frontend that is accessible over the internet for its customers and a CLI/CloudShell for the administrators. These entry points reach resources that are deployed within a VNet that spans the web tier and data tier. There can be load balancers before those tiers are accessed because it helps to spread out the traffic for high availability and low latency. The data tier might consist of a flexible MySQL server which uses a read replica.

When we modernize an existing application, we can ease our move to the cloud with the full promise of cloud technology. With a cloud native microservice approach, scalability and flexibility inherent to the cloud can be taken advantage of.  Modernizing the cloud native applications enables applications to run concurrently and seamlessly connect with existing investments. Barriers that prohibit productivity and integration are removed.

One of the tenets of modernizing involves "Build-once-and-deploy-on-any-cloud". This process begins with assessing the existing application, building the applications quickly, automating the deployments for productivity and run and consistently manage the modernized application.

Identifying applications that can be readily moved into the cloud platform and those that require refactoring is the first step because the treatments of lift-and-shift and refactoring are quite different. Leveraging containers as the foundation for applications and services is another aspect.

Automating deployments for productivity with a DevOps pipeline makes it quick and reliable.  A common management approach to consolidate operations for all applications ensure faster problem resolution.

When the application readiness is assessed, there are four tracks of investigation: cloud migration, cost reduction, agile delivery and innovation resulting in VMs in the cloud for migration purposes or containers for repackaging, re-platforming and refactoring respectively - all of these in the build phase of the build-deploy and run. While VMs are handled by migration accelerators in the deploy phases, the containers are handled by the modern DevOps pipelines in the deploy phase. The modern application runtimes for containers are also different from the common operations on VMs between the migration and modernization paths in the run phase. Finally, the migration results in a complex relocated traditional application while the modernization results in traditional application via repackaging, cloud ready application via re-platforming and cloud native application via refactoring.