With the increasing benefits of using the cloud, more and more organizations are migrating over their workloads. The key driver for this migration is the adoption of technology across every business vertical. With technology adoption, the investment in resources increases significantly. Google Cloud online training
At the start, organizations decided to host their infrastructure in their data center mainly due to flexibility and security reasons. But with the evolution of the cloud, rapidly changing business demands, and evolving technology, more and more organizations want to avoid upfront investment and adopt the flexibilities and agility offered by the cloud. The key driving factors are reduced operational costs, minimized hardware refresh cost, business agility, an adopted service model rather than building things from the ground up, and reduced operational risks.
However, cloud adoption is not a straightforward path. Migration of enterprise legacy applications or rehosting the infrastructure from the data center to the cloud can quickly go south if not planned properly. Even if they can successfully pull this off, they might end up operating the same way. It is important to continuously refine the infrastructure and adopt cloud design principles to leverage the real benefits of the cloud.
This article focuses on best practices that can help organizations make the migration to the cloud more successful.
Identify a Migration Strategy
A migration strategy is the most critical component for an active migration of infrastructure and applications to the cloud. A migration strategy starts with preparation and clear business justification for the migration. Gartner published the 5 "R's" which organizations can use to map out a migration strategy.
Rehost
The rehost strategy is also known as the "lift and shift" strategy. Typically, this strategy is chosen by an organization that wants to perform a quick migration of their application to the cloud for business use case purposes. Another common reason organizations choose the rehost strategy is to provide skill development time for the team.
Replatform
The re-platform strategy is also known as "lift, thinker, and shift." As a part of this strategy, the core architecture remains the same. However, this is a quick change that reduces the management and operations overhead and might save on costs. An example of this strategy would be moving the databases to a managed database service provided by the cloud providers or from one application server to another to save on licensing costs.
Repurchase
The repurchase strategy is also known as the "drop and shop." Here, organizations might decide to entirely shift from one product to another to meet the needs of a business use case and leverage the latest features and capabilities. For example, moving from one CMS platform to another, or leveraging a SaaS solution instead of homegrown products.
Refactoring or Re-Architecting
This is a problematic strategy to choose, but it eventually becomes one of the most rewarding for organizations. Often, when the existing application environment is not able to provide features, scale, and performance, organizations choose to refactor or re-architect their entire applications to meet the needs of a business use case which can help improve agility and business prospects.
Retire
This strategy is chosen as part of the discovery phase by organizations as they find that 10%-20% of resources are not used at all and can be quickly gotten rid of when migration to the cloud is complete.
Discovery and Component Elimination
There is no rule that only one of the cloud strategies is used as a part of the migration strategy. A key focus should be around the discovery of the resources and applications running in the data center. The discovery phase is not only limits identifying resources, but also the link or dependency between them. Once the discovery is complete, the next step is to determine the what needs to be migrated and what can be retired. Organizations should look at the component elimination part of the re-platform strategy and identify the architecture components which can easily be replaced by services provided by cloud providers. google cloud training
For example, instead of running the master-slave MySQL database infrastructure, organizations can choose to use a managed database service. Or, instead of running the SMTP server for sending emails, organizations can choose to use the email service provided by the cloud providers. This re-platform approach helps to reduce the actual cloud migration footprint and helps to experience the benefits and agility made available by the cloud providers.
Licensing and Migration Cost
License management is one of the most critical areas for cloud migration. The license management aspects apply to various areas of the environment, i.e., operating system licenses, application server licenses, and third-party tool licenses. As a part of the migration plan, organizations should validate whethe
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