NoSQL Application Redesign may be Unnecessary for Most Corporation Cloud Migration Deployments

Introduction

In this paper the authors first present a narrative review of key issues facing many corporate enterprises as they migrate key legacy applications to the cloud. Selected literature sources are used as support to present a practical viewpoint that the authors believe should be considered as the consider application redesign during migration analysis. A key issue for the purposes of this paper is to identify how the NoSQL database paradigm may or may not be beneficial for taking advantage of cloud computing, and finding a cost metric to help decide whether or not it is worth the effort for a majority of ‘typical’ corporations to redesign their legacy applications. Towards the end of the paper an approach is offered based on cost effectiveness to support the author’s conclusion that redesign to incorporate NoSQL may in fact be unneeded for most corporations who may be able to realize the majority of cost benefits simple from cloud migration and server virtualization.

Thesis: Re-design to incorporate NoSQL is not a paramount consideration for a large numbery of corporations and their legacy application migration plans based on cost effectiveness. Most enterprises have non-web-centric business models, are non-multinational in nature, and have a large number of legacy applications that do not need the scaling capability that cloud deployment with NoSQL affords, nor can such legacy applications tolerate the trade-offs between availability and consistency under the NoSQL model. Such corporations generally, are trying to capture operational cost-effectiveness with the added benefits of robust business continuity planning and disaster recovery, since their primary concern lies in the cloud’s ability to provide operational cost-effectiveness with the added benefits of robust business continuity planning and disaster recovery.