How to evaluate Cloud Agnosticness?

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As in any field of life, we need information to make a decision. The same with the ambition to be Cloud Agnostic.

So, what would we measure to know if our architecture is Cloud Agnostic?

As I mentioned in the 1st article, it is not binary but a grade of agnosticness.

To evaluate Cloud Agnosticness, I propose the following: the effort of migrating from current cloud to another cloud or another environment of your choosing.

From my experience in migration to cloud projects, when we get to the details of the technology, there is always something that need to be adopted, upgraded or replaced.

Before we decide anything, the first thing you need to do, is to measure what is your architecture grade of Cloud Agnosticness.

Since the calculation is based of effort, I propose the following parameters to categorize levels of effort:

• Migrate Lift & Shift - the closest to as-is migration.? Having the same Linux, copy folders, change few configurations and run
• Migrate by Export & Import - mostly relevant databases or storage service
• Migrate by deployment - take your code and deploy in another infrastructure
• Migrate by re-coding - require the most effort. Could be in case of using specific cloud services, mainly PaaS e.g. integration platform that is not available to the target environment
• Migrate by re-config - Could be in case of using specific PaaS services that you mostly configure e.g. API Gateway

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Please note that a cloud service migration effort may require for example re-coding and re-config.

Each of the parameters will get a value between 1 to 10 based on your rough effort estimation.

The function is calculated per each of the cloud service you use.

I have attached a worksheet to demonstrate the calculation.

Let's regard this as an open-source project, so you are welcome to comment, add or send other calculation worksheets.

Thanks for reading,

Noam