Currently, all growing businesses are dealing with transitions from on-premises infrastructures to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or both. From a strategic perspective, the decisions made referring to this significant technology shift will impact your company for the next decade.
Whether you are looking to move one workload or shutdown an entire data center, the transformation is complex and brings in many difficult decisions that influence key company processes. Successful cloud migration must rely on an in-depth analysis and high-level expertise.
In this review we answer some of the most important questions that our clients have asked during their cloud journey.
Moving to the cloud makes it initially difficult to choose from available services and technologies. The first question to be asked should be: How on-premise software would be reflected in the cloud?
Approaches to migration
There are three main approaches to cloud migration projects:
-
Lift and shift
Migrating raw VMs from the customer’s site to a cloud data center. -
Replatform
Migration that involves moving to a managed/improved, but generally compatible cloud service. Typically, this approach involves slight adjustments, such as a software upgrades. In this case it is possible to benefit from some of the cloud capabilities, such as autoscaling or maintenance work reduction.
-
Refactor
A complete overhaul, that potentially requires splitting a monolithic application to separate software components. This migration requires additional development work, but rewritten applications can fully benefit from the advantages of cloud computing and what PaaS or SaaS offers.
Containerization
Refactoring opens the possibility to redesign the system using a modern architectural approach, e.g. Service-Oriented Architecture or Microservices. When discussing such changes it’s worth mentioning one of the hottest topics nowadays – containerization. This type of architecture addresses many issues which an organization might come across while developing, maintaining, and publishing a service.
Currently, each major cloud provider offers a managed Kubernetes service which helps to simplify the containers’ infrastructure management like network, environment separation, security, configuration mappings, security keys, and many more. Managed service means that on Kubernetes each of the cloud gives infrastructure an SLA. Depending on the cloud, it is typically 99.95%. This managed service is easy to scale out if an organization needs more computing power or more services to run on Kubernetes.
