A CIO’s Guide to Cloud
Application Migration
Robert Christiansen
Best practices for building your Minimum Viable Cloud
and preparing for large-scale application migration.
Do you want to be in the data center business?
We didn’t think so and you’re not alone. Most CIOs have a deep desire to get out
of the data center business. Corporate leadership, understanding the benefits
of public cloud, are directing IT to reduce costs. Therefore, many IT executives
are turning to public cloud as a model for reduced total cost of ownership
(TCO). This requires a significant migration of application workloads out of
data centers and into public clouds. Our experience points to an average TCO
savings of 40% year-over-year, achieved through what we call Migration @
Scale - moving application workloads to public cloud providers using a factory
model. We’ll discuss the specifics of this factory approach later on in this guide.
A successful cloud program requires a basic change of mindset. It groups have
traditionally approached big projects as if they were launching a rocket: make
or acquire the components, install them, test everything, put it all on a launch
pad and send it off. With cloud adoption, this approach presents too many
opportunities to get it wrong. It also traps IT in the ‘Tyranny of How’, paralyzed
by analysis, evaluation, preparation, planning, strategizing and a host of issues
that get in the way of actually doing something meaningful.
There is, however, a fundamental concept that is proven to break the old thinking paradigm. We call it the MVC, or Minimum Viable Cloud, built on the same
premise as the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, from the book, The Lean
Startup. In the MVC we teach clients how to iterate their cloud program to prepare for Migration @ Scale.
Iteration can be a hard concept to embrace, requiring IT execs to abandon
their waterfall model of data center management. In the new model, infrastructure is code. The public cloud lets you use software to create the data
center. Whether it is Chef, CloudFormation, Puppet or Ansible, software
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