Several have provided additional questions to pose when you’re looking at cloud providers. The questions seem to vary a bit if you’re making the first move, or if you’ve been there a bit and are assessing cloud options. This hints at a key point – do your due diligence folks. Many people I’ve talked to have done, then re-done their move to the cloud (in whole or in part). If you can avoid that second step, you’re in a much better place.
The questions don’t necessarily have "right" answers – it’s what you need to know so you can know what you’ll have to be covering, doing and managing to succeed at a given provider.
– How much flexibility is there to enable, and disable services (and how does it impact billing)? Are you able to pay for things on a usage basis? In some cases, if services are enabled, they’re also billable. In other cases, costs are based on IO or other metrics. Be sure you understand what "on" means.
– What is the failover architecture you need to have in place to fully realize the benefits of the provider? Specifically, read through their recommendations, understand their tools and *why* they have those tools. It will give you insight into the providers intentions and expectations of you as a customer if you want to really be using their services.
– What access will you have to the servers, services and systems you put in place? Is it real-time, with a console, or do you call in requests, or is there some other way you update things? Do you have access to ALL of your chosen components, or just some, with others requiring assistance? Understand where the responsibility lines are in taking care of your environment.
Next up, I’ll take a look at some SQL Server-oriented questions you’ll want to consider.
What am I missing so far? Shoot me an email, let me know.