You must have heard from numerous IT executives who are attempting to migrate important company apps to the public cloud throughout my more than ten years of involvement in the cloud computing industry. Their teams have struggled or had varying degrees of success migrating to the cloud in a number of instances. They persisted though, and they made use of the lessons they had learnt to get better results the next time they tried.
Avoid making the same errors twice if your firm is contemplating a cloud move as a modernization effort for mission-critical applications. To improve your chances of successful cloud migration, we turned those lessons learned into this checklist of the key areas you need to think about and handle.
The cloud migration checklist includes:
Step 1: Create the position of migration architect.
Before you begin your cloud migration, decide who will play the role of the migration engineer and oversee the effort. The system architect-level profession of the mobility architect is in charge of planning and carrying out every aspect of the migration. Their main responsibilities should be identifying the refactoring required to guarantee the migration’s accomplishment, creating data management methods, outlining the requirements for cloud solutions, and deciding on migration prioritization and production rollout protocols.
Step 2: Select the degree of cloud integration you want.
You can move an application from an on-site data centre to the cloud using either a shallow cloud injection or a deep cloud integration.
Step 3: Decide whether to use one cloud or multiple clouds.
Prior to beginning your cloud migration, take the following into account: Do you want your software to be able to run on a variety of cloud service providers such as snowflake, or do you just want it to be able to run on one cloud service provider?
Making your application compatible with a specific cloud provider is not difficult. Your developers just require to become knowledgeable through one service ( iaas ) cloud APIs for your application to assume greater use of the features that your chosen hosting company has to supply.
One programme runs in one cloud, while another run in another cloud. One set of applications is run in one cloud provider and another set in another, according to perhaps the simplest multi-cloud strategy. With this strategy, you have more negotiating power with different providers and options regarding where to place applications in the future. Additionally, it enables provider-specific application optimization for every application.
Step 4: Develop cloud KPIs.
The measurements you collect about your application or service—known as key performance indicators, or KPIs—are used to compare how well it is performing to your expectations. Even if you’ve already established some KPIs for your applications and services, do they still apply to those when they’re hosted in the cloud?
Finding the ideal KPIs for cloud migration
The finest KPIs for a cloud migration demonstrate how your migration is progressing and highlight any visible or hidden issues that might be present in your application. The ability to use cloud migration KPIs to gauge the progress and completion of the migration may be the most crucial.
Step 5: Setting performance benchmarks
Baselining seems to be the method of assessing the current (post) functionality of your program or service to establish yet if the prospective (post-migration) functionality will be acceptable. The identification of any problems that arise during a cloud migration can also be accomplished using baselines.
Guidelines for setting baselines
- Establish a baseline statistic for each KPI you’ve chosen to track.
- Establish the length of time you will gather data to establish the baseline. While using a brief baseline time (like a day) enables you to proceed more quickly, you run the risk of not gathering a representative performance sample. Though it obviously takes more effort, using a longer baseline period (like a month) can result in more accurate statistics.
- You must also decide if you want to incorporate data gathered during “peak” or “critical” periods or just baseline data that is average or representative. Do you want to collect data over a day with a major news event, for example, or do you want to avoid such days if you run a news website?
No matter whatever data-collection strategy is best for your industry, be careful to specify exactly what kind of data you’ll be gathering and for how long.
Step 6: Choose the migration components
Select whether you’ll migrate your application to the cloud all at once, service by service, or component by component.
Services’ connections
Start by identifying the connections between your services and which ones depend on which others. For larger, more complex systems, use an application performance monitoring tool that can generate dependency diagrams from service maps. Using the dependency diagram, decide which components should be migrated and in what order.
Getting ready to move
Beginning your migration preparation with the services with the fewest dependencies is frequently a wise choice. Your internal services would be moved first in this scenario, then your external services, which are frequently the ones nearest to your clients. A different approach is to begin with the services that are the most external to your target audience so that you can control any influence on them.
Step 7: Carry out any necessary refactoring.
You might want to make further adjustments before migrating your applications and services to the cloud to make sure they function as effectively and efficiently as feasible there. For example, you might want to refactor your application:
- As a result, it allows for dynamic scaling with a variable number of operating instances, potentially saving you money on cloud service fees.
- As a result, rather than statically assigning resources in advance, your resource usage can make better use of dynamic-cloud characteristics, such as the capacity to dynamically allocate and de-allocate resources as needed.
- Before the transfer, to adopt a more service-oriented architecture so that you may more quickly migrate particular services to the cloud.
Step 8: Design a plan for data relocation.
One of the most challenging aspects of a cloud migration is data migration. The placement of your data can have a big effect on how well your application works. Performance may suffer if you move your data to the cloud when most of your data access methods are still on-premises. The same is true if the service that accesses the data is located in the cloud but the data itself is still on-premises.
Step 9: Examine the resource allocation for the application.
There are still a few things to think about even after you’ve finished moving everything to the cloud. Resource optimization is crucial.
Statically allocating resources defeats the purpose of using the cloud, which is optimised for dynamic resource allocation. Make sure your teams have a strategy for allocating resources to your application when you transition to the cloud. When you need to add more resources to a cloud application, the vendor often makes them available in almost any quantity at any time. This indicates that, provided your teams have application architecture in place to support dynamic scaling, you can typically trust that you can scale as needed to meet demand.
The Bottom Line
Even though switching to the cloud is frequently a no-brainer, transferring programmes to the cloud is sometimes difficult or only partially successful for many firms. You can begin planning your cloud adoption without worrying about expensive mistakes if you follow the checklist for cloud migration provided above.
