Great for simple tasks. Not well-suited for more complex migrations
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have two use cases for AWS Database Migration Service.
<ul><li> AWS Database Migration Service is used to replicate certain critical data relationships between the production and lower environment databases. The business problem is keeping data consistency between the environments. An example is an equipment association with job sites. Equipment moves between job sites and those associations have to be updated.</li><li> We use AWS Database Migration Service to populate our lower environment databases with production-like data. AWS Database Migration Service replicates and transforms production data into our dev and QA databases. In so doing, AWS Database Migration Service provides production-like data for our engineering and QA teams. It does not work too well for this purpose. The task and mapping settings are limited so we end up having to manually de-duplicate data which prevents this from being a continual and near real-time process. AWS Database Migration Service helps with the initial replication but because we have to do many manual tasks it's not ideal. Our schema design contributes to this and had we considered replication our experience may have been better.</li></ul>
Pros
- Replicating specific data elements on a continuous basis
- Replicating entire databases - making a carbon copy
- Managing many simultaneously running replication tasks
Cons
- More extensive task and mapping settings
- De-duplication support
Most Important Features
- Ongoing replication of data between environments to maintain consistency
- Bulk loading data between databases
- Single dashboard to manage multiple replication tasks
Return on Investment
- Set it and forget it for maintaining data consistency - moderate cost, zero to minimal maintenance
- High touch production data loads into QA - negative ROI engineering time investment far exceeded our predictions