Automated Database Migration to SQL Azure for a software company in USA

About Company

Company provides a secure enterprise-grade assessment platform and professional services to leading organizations around the world. Its full-service online assessment tool and professional services help customers to improve their performance and meet their compliance requirements. They enable organizations to unlock their potential by delivering assessments which are valid, reliable, fair and defensible.

Project Summary

Client had multiple datacentres in USA and Europe with massive number of databases that they wanted to bring to Azure over the Azure Elastic Pool to save cost. They wanted an efficient way of migrating these databases to Azure with a few clicks and minimal amount of downtime. We were able to migrate 1000+ databases to Azure in a fully automated solution. This project had the highest amount of visibility within the Microsoft product team and resources were committed to ensure project is a big success.

Challenge

Due to clients large no. of databases residing in 2 different regions (USA and Europe) ranging close to 500-600 databases in each region, a manual approach to migration would have been a recipe for disaster. It was important to have an automated solution with various number of PowerShell scripts utilising multiple Azure services. This solution should be able to create databases, migrate schemas to destination databases and then perform actual migration for 100s databases at a time.

Solution

We assigned a team of certified Azure experts who did a deep analysis in 14 days to understand the environment and requirements, finally choosing Azure DMS for the job. Azure DMS offline and online service made it possible to migrate on-premise data to Azure Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database. Our team built a PowerShell script which works in 5 simple steps for offline and online migration. This involved creating databases as an exact number which are there at source (considering 1 on-premise datacenter), schema deployment to destination, setting up migration and building the DMS activities to migrate 10 databases in each activity.

We considered pros & cons of Azure DMS and worked closely with Microsoft product team in Seattle to come up with the plan to migrate all the databases within a short downtime-period requested by the client for minimal business impact. The meticulous planning, POC and testing by our engineers over a period of 2 months led to a successful migration.

During this process our team also helped the Microsoft Product Team with close feedback and even reported bugs that helped improve the Azure DMS service.