A Comprehensive Guide to Ten-Step Cloud Migration Checklist

A Comprehensive Guide to Ten-Step Cloud Migration Checklist

I’ve heard from many IT executives working to maneuver key enterprise applications to the general public cloud because I have been involved in cloud computing for quite a decade. Their teams have struggled or had limited success with cloud migration in several cases. But they never gave up, and they learned from their mistakes to enhance their performance in future attempts.

You don’t want to form identical mistakes as others if your company is looking to modernize mission-critical applications and is considering a cloud migration as a part of the method. As a result, this post uses those insights to make a 10-step cloud migration checklist that covers all of the main factors to contemplate and address so as to extend your chances of successful cloud migration.

Step 1: Assign the role of the migration architect

Establish the migration architect role to guide the hassle before you start your cloud migration. The migration architect may be a system architect-level position to blame for coming up with and completing all aspects of the migration; their primary responsibilities should include defining necessary refactoring to confirm a successful cloud migration, designing data migration strategies, defining cloud-solution requirements, and determining migration priorities and production switchover mechanisms.

Many decisions and technical plans must be made during the course of an oversized migration project, and having a migration architect who is to blame for all aspects of the migration is critical to the project’s success.

Step 2: settle on the extent of cloud integration you wish

There are two ways to migrate an application to the cloud from an on-premises data center: shallow cloud integration and deep cloud integration.

A shallow cloud integration (also referred to as “lift-and-shift”) involves moving an on-premises application to the cloud while making no—or minimal—changes to the cloud servers that won’t run the application. Any changes to the appliance are only required to form it and add the new environment. You do not make use of services that are only available within the cloud. Because the application is lifted “as is” and shifted to the cloud in its entirety, this model is additionally called lift-and-shift.

During the migration process, you modify your application to require advantage of key cloud capabilities for deep cloud integration. This might be as simple as auto-scaling and dynamic load balancing, or as complex as using server-less computing capabilities like AWS Lambda for parts of the appliance. Employing a cloud-specific data store like Amazon S3 or DynamoDB could even be part of it.

Step 3: Decide whether you wish to use one cloud or a mix of clouds

Before you begin your cloud migration, you must decide whether you would like to migrate your application to one cloud provider and optimize it for that environment, or if you wish it to run on multiple cloud providers.

It’s relatively simple to optimize your application for a selected cloud provider. Your development teams will only need to learn one set of cloud APIs and your app is going to be able to use all of the features that your cloud provider needs to offer.

Vendor lock-in is one disadvantage of this strategy. Moving your application to a distinct provider after it has been updated to figure with only that one provider could take even as much time because of the original cloud migration. Furthermore, having only 1 cloud provider may limit your ability to barter important terms with the cloud provider, like pricing and repair level agreements (SLAs).

But hold on, there’s more. Using multiple cloud providers will be wiped out some different ways:

• One application lives in one cloud, while another lives in another. One set of applications is run in one cloud provider, while another set is run in another. This strategy gives you more business clout with multiple providers, similarly to more flexibility to decide where to deploy applications in the future. It also allows you to optimize each application for the service provider that it runs on.
• Distribute your app across a variety of cloud providers. Some businesses favor running parts of their applications on one cloud provider et al on another. Using this method, you’ll cash in on the key benefits that every provider must offer (for example, one provider may need better AI capabilities than another, which is thought to its database speeds). The danger here is that the performance of both providers is intertwined, and any issues with one each of them could negatively impact the customer experience of your app.
• Create a cloud-agnostic application. Other businesses create software that will run on any cloud provider. You may run your app on multiple providers at an identical time or split the load between them using this method. Because you’ll easily transfer loads from one cloud provider to a different, this model gives you the foremost flexibility in vendor negotiations. The disadvantage is that you simply may find it difficult to use each cloud provider’s key capabilities, reducing the benefits of cloud hosting your application. This method could make the event and validation of your application tougher.

Step 4: Establish cloud KPIs

KPIs are metrics that you just collect about your application or service to determine how it performs compared to your expectations. You will have already set some KPIs for your applications and services, but are they still appropriate for cloud-based applications and services? The most effective cloud migration KPIs show how your migration is progressing, highlighting any visible or hidden issues which will exist within your application. Cloud migration KPIs, perhaps most significantly, can aid in determining when migration is complete and successful.

Step 5: Set performance benchmarks

Baselining is the process of assessing your application’s or service’s current (pre-migration) performance to determine if its future (post-migration) performance is appropriate. Baselines assist you in determining when your migration is complete, still confirming the expected post-migration performance gains. Baselines can even be wont to diagnose any issues that arise during a cloud migration.

Establish a baseline metric for every KPI you intend to trace. Determine the length of your time you’ll collect data to ascertain a baseline. You’ll move faster by choosing a brief baseline period (such as a day), but you risk missing out on a representative performance sample. Choosing an extended baseline period (such as a month) takes longer but ends up in more representative data.

You must also decide whether you would like only average or representative baseline data or data collected during “peak” or “critical” periods. Does one want to gather data on days when there’s a serious happening, for instance, or does one want to avoid such days?

Whatever data-collection model is best for your industry ensures to spell out exactly what quiet information you’ll collect and for a way long.

Step 6: Make an inventory of the migration components that are most vital to you.

You must also choose whether to migrate your entire application to the cloud without delay or component by component or service by service.

First, work out how your services are connected and which services are obsessed with which others. Use an app performance monitoring tool that will generate dependency diagrams from service maps for larger, more complex applications. Decide which components should be migrated first and in what order using the dependency diagram. Starting with the services with the fewest dependencies is commonly the simplest strategy. During this case, you’ll start by migrating your most internal services, then locomote to your outermost services, which are usually those closest to your customers. An alternative choice is to start with the services that are closest to your customers—those that are the foremost external—so that you just can manage any impact on them.

Step 7: Do any refactoring that’s required.

Before migrating your applications and services to the cloud, you’ll want to try to do some additional work on them to make sure that they run as smoothly as possible. You may want to refactor your application in the following way:

• As a result, it scales effectively with a variable number of running instances, potentially saving you money on cloud service costs.
• As a result, rather than statically allocating resources prior to time, you’ll be able to take profit from dynamic-cloud capabilities just like the ability to dynamically allocate and de-allocate resources PRN.
• Before migrating to the cloud, you must move to a more service-oriented architecture so individual services are moved more easily.

Step 8: Make a thought for data migration

One of the foremost difficult aspects of cloud migration is data migration. The placement of your data features a big impact on your application’s performance. When your data is moved to the cloud but your data access methods remain primarily on-premises, performance can suffer. If the information continues to be on-premises, but the service that accesses it’s within the cloud, the identical thing applies.

There is a range of information migration options available, such as:

• Using a two-way syncing mechanism between your on-premises and cloud databases. Remove the on-premises database once you’ve moved all of your data consumers to the cloud.
• Allow customers to attach only to the on-premises version of a database with one-way synchronization to a cloud-based database. When you’re ready, shut down access to the on-premises version therefore the cloud-based version can take over because of the primary database, and provides cloud-based users access to the new database.

Step 9: Put off the ability

When and the way does one migrate the assembly system from the on-premises to the cloud version? The complexity and architecture of your application, further because the architecture of your data and data stores, will all influence the solution.

There are two approaches that are frequently used:

• Make all of your decisions at an identical time. Switch traffic from the on-premises stack to the cloud stack once you’ve moved the complete application or service to the cloud and verified that it works there.
• Start small and work your high. Move some customers over, double-check that everything remains working, so add some more. Continue during this manner until all of your customers have switched to the cloud-based application.

Step 10: Check the allocation of application resources.

There are some more things to think about after you’ve finished migrating everything to the cloud. Resource optimization is the most vital. You are not taking advantage of the cloud’s strengths if you allocate resources (servers, as an example) statically. Confirm your teams have a technique in situ for distributing resources to your application as you progress to the cloud. After you need more resources for a cloud application, you’ll be able to usually get them from the seller in almost any quantity at any time. Assuming your teams have the appliance architecture in situ to support dynamic scaling, you’ll typically trust that you simply can scale as needed to satisfy demand.

Other Aspects to Think About Cloud Migration

Although the ten steps during this cloud migration checklist cover lots of ground, there are some other things to stay in mind as you migrate to the cloud. Creating a secure and secure cloud environment, for example, is an important component of any cloud migration. Fortunately, the foremost cloud providers provide a wealth of tools and resources to help with the development and maintenance of a secure system.

There are two general rules for cloud pricing: the cloud is a smaller amount expensive than on-premises, and also the cloud is costlier than on-premises. Reckoning on the context, either is true or false.

It’s possible that when you begin using the cloud, you’ll discover that your infrastructure costs have risen compared to what you were paying for your physical data center. This might happen for a variety of reasons:

First, all infrastructure systems have hidden costs, and you’ll not be considering all of the prices related to running your own data center, whereas your cloud provider’s monthly bill spells out all of the prices. So, what was the outcome? When apples and oranges are compared, the cloud solution appears to be costlier than the on-premises solution.

Second, on-premises infrastructure costs are primarily made of capital expenditures (CapEx), whereas cloud infrastructure costs are typically made of operating expenses (OpEx). CapEx is also easier to return by than OpEx, reckoning how your business manages its finances. Understanding a way to purchase cloud-based infrastructures differs from paying for on-premises infrastructures, likewise as ensuring that your company’s financial models support these differences, is critical to recognizing cloud cost savings.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.