Are you migrating to cloud?

In last 2 decade we noticed that the digital footprint of business has grown far more than the earlier expectation. Result of forever growing business and digitalization of work, organizations are looking for more robust, Secure and cost-effective infrastructure.

We all do remember the day when just to increase disk space business must wait for days and weeks. Sometimes they must compromise with business because the infrastructure cannot keep up with their business growth or it’s becoming too expensive.

Majority of infrastructure issue have dealt with different cloud provider. However, it was noticed that while migrating the infrastructure/Application to cloud we do overlook few basic points, and which always cause unpleasant, lengthy and expensive experience of migration.

I’ll be talking about several migration Approach, points which ideally, we should consider while thinking about cloud migration. To keep it readable I shall split this in smaller chunk and based on reader interest will prioritize the topics.

1.????Determine what kind of migration you or your clients are looking for?

Clients hire consultant or IT company because often they do know their end goal (outcome) but they look expert to help them on discover the path on how to achieve those end goal.

As an Architect it’s our role to make sure that we gather all available date (said and unsaid) and determine what would be best for client.

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There could be several factors while determining the type of migration. I personally put them in 6 groups as shown in below image.

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·??????Rehosting or Lift and Shift

This use case consists either creating infrastructure and doing manual installation or utilizing cloud Migration tools to create the VHD and other files and migrate the system as-it-is in Cloud.

??Manual installation is highly use when you deal with customization, have dependency of IP, Network, paths e.t.c.

??Manual configuration and installation get used when you want to enhance or make a change in state of current application.

??If application of system is independent (do not consist hard coded IP) and you want to maintain current state of application, you can check the feasibility for migrating the system using migration tool.

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·??????Re-platforming

This use case consists the type of migration which need changes in platform, be it wither compute, Load Balancing, availability, security and many more. You basically keep the same application or working method but increase the power, performance and availability.

?·??????Re-purchasing

This use case consists the type of migration in which you see more benefit in moving the application to other tool, Utilizing SaaS and PaaS feature of cloud and reducing the maintenance overhead as much as possible.

For example, you suggest using PaaS SQL and get read of DB Virtual machine. Suggest for Cosmos DB for certain application and many more.

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·??????Refactoring ?

To me it basically consists redesigning the application, rearchitect the current situation and currently completely different solution. It could be entirely different architecture on platform, or on application or on both.

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·??????Retain

There might be a possibility that client is looking for a possibility to explore the option to move the application to cloud but while analysing it may come up that the best possible solution to retain the current solutions instead of moving to cloud. Although there are very few such cases, but it could be due to below region.

??Top level data security, in which client cannot store the data in different country datacentre and could provide do not have their datacentre in that country. Chance of such case is less than 0.01% but this could be

??Application need to decommission in coming future (let say 2-3 years) and as architect you noticed that the cost of migration will exceed the current OPEX cost.

??If data/system is used locally and need high throughput. Since Cloud need an internet connection and throughput it always dependent on bandwidth. Establishing EXPRESSROUTE cost should also need to be factored.

·??????Retire/Decommission

This is basically not directly a part of migration activity, however in some case you discover that the application need to decommission but to various business region such as compliance, security, future use the data need to be archived. In this case you can leverage Cloud archival storage and infrastructure to reduce the OPEX and CAPEX significantly.

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…Stay tuned many more to come.

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For deep discussion connect me over LinkedIn or leave me a message.?