When we moved our transport planning system to the cloud, its database went onto the provider's managed service. That was the point of the move. Somebody else would patch it, back it up and keep it running, and for four years it did exactly that.
What the managed service did not do was upgrade the major version for us. That needs testing against the application, and the application belongs to a supplier who certifies it against particular versions. We stayed on the version we had migrated with, because it worked and the supplier had not asked us to change.
Last spring our monthly cloud bill rose by about eleven thousand pounds and stayed there. The increase was on three database instances, under a line we had not seen before. The version we were running had reached the end of the provider's standard support, and the provider had moved us onto its paid extended support automatically, charged for every processor core every hour. On our largest instances it added a little under eighty percent to the cost. The notices had gone to the email address on the account, which was a mailbox belonging to the migration project, closed in 2023.
Nobody had done anything wrong. The supplier was happy on the old version, the database ran without a fault, and the managed service had no reason to raise it with anybody. The cost of standing still had simply moved from risk, which nobody is billed for, to a line on an invoice.
The upgrade took nine weeks, most of it waiting for the supplier to certify the newer version and for our planners to test it through two busy Mondays. We now keep a list of every managed service we run with its version and the date standard support ends, reviewed every quarter, and any version within twelve months of that date goes into the plan for the following quarter. Provider notices go to a shared mailbox my team reads. Supplier contracts now include a commitment to certify new database versions within six months of release.
In our own data centre an old version was a risk we chose to carry. On a managed service it is a monthly charge, and the provider decides when it begins.
– Serguey Shinder
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