A cloud migration strategy moves applications, data, and other business aspects from on-premises to a cloud computing environment.
By migrating to the cloud, your business can see reduced computing costs and improved performance, reliability, and security.
Let’s look at the hypothetical company, AcmeCorp, to see how it could benefit from cloud migration. AcmeCorp was the go-to company for local, same-day small parcel delivery.
Recently, AcmeCorp lost half of its business to Uber and Lyft, offering more convenient delivery services at a lower cost.
5 Possible Paths of Cloud Migration Strategy
Make the switch to cloud-based products as painless as possible by planning your company’s cloud migration strategy.
AcmeCorp’s operations and customer interactions run on legacy infrastructure: 15-year-old on-premise hardware and software. Customers can arrange deliveries with AcmeCorp only via telephone or an outdated website.
Customers can’t see helpful updates about their deliveries while they are in transit. And AcmeCorp can’t easily change its delivery routes once drivers are on the road.
Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft utilize features made possible by cloud infrastructures like mobile apps, live delivery driver location broadcasting, automated SMS delivery updates, and AI-powered delivery route planning.
AcmeCorp will soon become unviable as a business unless it uses cloud computing to bootstrap its digital transformation. A cloud provider can handle AcmeCorp’s heavy lifting with practically unlimited computing power at a low cost.
Cloud Migration Strategy
A one-size-fits-all approach for moving to the cloud doesn’t exist. A company like AcmeCorp could benefit from an expert technology partner like INGENO to help them explore, select, and implement a suitable cloud migration strategy.
But, before selecting a cloud migration strategy, one must also think of ITAD services for getting rid of all the storage equipment, physical hardware, infrastructure, and devices, as they would no longer be required.
This is when you need to rope in an expert like “Dataknox” if your company is based out of Newark, CA, as they are a popular name in the domain of IT asset disposition services.
This article will explore five mature, tried-and-tested cloud migration strategies that INGENO could help you implement in your business.
#1. What Is Lift-and-Shift?
Rehosting, also known as lift-and-shift, moves an application and its data to cloud hosting without redesigning the app. Instead, lift-and-shift takes advantage of a cloud provider’s infrastructure (IaaS) infrastructure.
Pros
- Immediate cost savings. Applications can utilize more cost-effective cloud computer systems without costly development and testing time.
- Easy performance boost. Applications may be running on more powerful cloud-based hardware.
- Lower risk of new security vulnerabilities. Applications stay mostly the same when moved to the cloud.
- Highly available second site. Moving data to a cloud location is often cheaper than existing disaster recovery plans.
Cons
- Doesn’t take full advantage of the cloud. Lifted and built shifted applications to run on on-premises hardware. Their architecture won’t allow them to take advantage of autoscaling and dynamic load balancing.
- Latency and performance issues. On-premises applications were designed to run on specific systems. So, they may not perform well once moved to a cloud environment.
#2. What Is Refactoring for the Cloud?
Refactoring is migrating an application to the cloud by re-architecting it to run on a cloud provider’s platform. Refactoring for the cloud takes advantage of a cloud provider’s platform as a service (PaaS).
Pros
- Improved functionality. Your applications can be re-architected and developed to benefit from the flexibility and scalability of the cloud.
- Minimal rewriting. Developers can reuse their existing applications’ languages, frameworks, and whole chunks of code.
- Reduced costs. Re-architecting an application for more effective resource management on the cloud, scaling up and down as necessary, can help reduce high operating costs.
- Improved reliability. Application components are decoupled from each other and integrated with highly available managed services.
Cons
- More complex. Refactoring involves code changes that require expertise to pull off successfully. There is always some risk of code errors that have been changed, leading to delays, cost increases, and unexpected service downtime.
- Increased time to deploy. All code changes need to be tested thoroughly.
- Vendor lock-in. Integrating with the services of any cloud provider makes migrating to a different provider later more difficult. Still, it’s usually a better strategy to optimize time-to-market and innovation opportunities.
#3. What Are Cloud Containers?
A container is a standalone software executable that contains everything it needs to function. A container separates an application from the environment in which it runs.
A container can include software dependencies needed by the application, such as code libraries and specific versions of programming languages.
A container that runs on cloud computers is merely known by the additional name of a cloud container.
Pros
- There is no vendor lock-in. An application packaged in a container is decoupled from its operating environment and can easily be redeployed.
- Minimal effort to deploy. An application can have everything it needs to run included in its container. So, the application should run as expected, with no bugs from different environments.
- Cheaper to run. Containers don’t require much memory to run because they don’t need an operating system to be executed. So, they can be more affordable to run in a cloud environment.
- Easy to create. Applications are usually simple to containerize.
Cons
- Who can containerize all applications? An app can’t be containerized if it depends on a specific platform or directly manipulates hardware devices.
#4. What is serverless?
An application has a serverless architecture when broken up into functions that can be invoked and scaled individually on the cloud as needed.
Converting an application to a serverless architecture takes advantage of a cloud provider’s function as a service (FaaS).
Pros
- There is no need to manage servers. Developers can focus on business functionality. The cloud provider handles all the server software and hardware needed to run the functions.
- Pay for what you use. You are charged for the resources used when requests are being held. You pay for your exact customer demand.
- Always available. Server resources are made available as needed. And your application will rarely be unresponsive due to the performance of the underlying infrastructure.
Cons
- Not suitable for longer-running functions. Serverless functions are designed to run for a maximum of minutes. Tasks that take longer to run will time out.
- Charges for data transfer. You are charged for the computing resources used. High external data transfers can increase costs significantly.
- It is difficult to debug. Function contexts don’t persist once completed. So, bugs can be challenging to locate.
#5. What is Cloud-Native?
A cloud-native migration is moving your entire infrastructure and development operations to the cloud. In the next section, let’s look at the benefits of cloud-native development and management.
Benefits of Cloud-Native
A significant benefit of the cloud-native development approach is how infrastructure resources are allocated. In traditional applications, developers manage resource allocations manually.
Cloud-native applications, however, are deployed on the cloud, where the underlying computing, storage, and network infrastructure are abstracted away.
Developers can allocate resources without worrying about whether they will be available, thanks to virtually unlimited computing resources.
Who can improve cloud-native application performance beyond infrastructure? Each service that forms a part of a cloud-native application, from analytics to databases to IoT to ML, is developed with the best-suited language and framework.
Cloud-native applications aren’t tied to any particular computer operating system or type. This means that the underlying hardware and software executing the applications can be replaced when newer, better versions become available.
Finally, independent DevOps teams can develop, test, and deploy microservices on their schedules without disrupting other parts of a cloud-native application. In this way, who can update an application with minor improvements more frequently?
Migrating to the Cloud With Minimal Disruption to Business
Cloud migration can be done in a phased manner to minimize business disruption.
In phase one, applications can be moved to the cloud immediately with lift-and-shift with minimal risk of disruption to business activity. No code is changed, and surrounding infrastructure is communicated with as before the lift-and-shift. In addition, any parts of applications that run for extended periods can be migrated to cloud containers.
In phase two, who can refactor the lifted-and-shifted applications to take advantage of more cloud-native features and services, such as serverless functions?
After phase two, future application development and management can be cloud-native for improved application speed, agility, and resilience.
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