INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Migration ‘is no longer about
adopting a cloud-first approach’
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The cloud first approach
made popular last year
is no longer hailed as
the answer to cloud
domination. Instead,
Christian Mahncke, Routed
Enterprise Business
Development, Africa’s
only vendor neutral cloud
infrastructure provider,
says that migration in
2019 will be more carefully
considered and measured.
A
forced approach towards cloud is
not ideal. While insight into cloud
has improved and uptake is on the
rise, lessons have already been learnt and
the approach for 2019 is to only migrate
what is suited to the public cloud.
If migration doesn’t make financial sense,
then it shouldn’t happen. Additionally,
migration should ensure the infrastructure is
reliable and has greater scalability, resulting
in an improvement in overall agility as well.
There are four main factors affecting the
success of legacy application migrations:
Lift and shift approach: In some cases,
legacy applications may just ‘lift and
shift’ into the cloud without much effort.
Even if the legacy application performs
no better in the cloud, a cloud hosted
legacy application might fit well into the
organisation’s cloud strategy, which wants
to host all their applications – old and new
– in the cloud.
Refactoring: This involves a more advanced
process of re-architecting, and recoding,
certain parts of an existing application to
take advantage of cloud native functionality.
In this way, organisations can take full
advantage of cloud-native features to
maximise operational costs in the cloud.
This is probably the most time-consuming
and resource intensive option but
ensures the lowest monthly spend of all
migration options.
Christian Mahncke, Routed Enterprise
Business Development
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Break-up and re-assemble: In some
cases, the migration of monolithic legacy
applications into much smaller micro
services could be seen as a challenge on its
own. Applications might have to be broken
down into smaller, more manageable
chunks and then re-assembled for cloud
use, a process which is obviously fraught
with all sorts of integration, migration or
assembly challenges, but what other option
is there when faced with migrating a large
legacy application.
Leave it alone: This is not a migration
strategy, but rather ‘best to leave it alone
option’. Not all legacy applications should
be migrated into the cloud or stuck into
containers or micro services. Some legacy
applications are more than 10 to 20 years
old, they were developed in a pre-cloud
era, they were developed using COBOL and
FORTRAN, and they were not developed to
benefit from cloud native frameworks
or functionality.
Many were huge applications, developed
over years and enhanced many times
over, some losing its sophisticated coding
standards and slipping into the world of
spaghetti code, deeply entwined with their
databases or operating system, with many
external interfaces, or licensing restrictions,
that they cannot be moved anywhere, never
mind into the cloud.
Some organisations assume that moving
applications into the cloud will automatically
increase performance but have then been
disappointed when this did not happen.
Latency issues can occur when applications
and data are split, or hosted in separate
environments, and response times can
be affected because some applications
require excessively high I/Os which may
not be available in the cloud. Some legacy
applications simply won’t function better in
the cloud.
Migrating legacy applications into the cloud
is no easy task. There are many options and
partnering with the right company to ensure
your approach is a success is vital. n
www.intelligentcio.com