The Doppler Quarterly Spring 2019 | Page 21

Put Everything in Storage Conclusion Unlike a meal, data lives on as long as it is useful. It needs to be reliably stored, so it can be reanalyzed, repackaged and reused. Cloud migration planning is not easy. It is an involved pro- cess. But with the right data analytics tools and processes, you can prepare a proper migration plan that takes into account the intricacies of your environment. All of the major public cloud service providers have rich sets of capabilities for storing structured and unstructured data. Amazon S3 has high durability and solid SLAs. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have their own storage services with similar capabilities. Another, more sophisticated alternative for storage is a graph database, such as Neo4j or Amazon Neptune. A graph database is an optimal way to represent complex nonlinear relationships (such as shared infrastructure and transitive dependencies between components), but it is not absolutely required. A relational database management system (RDBMS) can store structured sets of data that can be queried for use in other applications. Although relational technology is not optimal for traversing multi-hop refer- ences, it can still be used with a little more effort. Without going through this process, there is increased risk of missing important details about the assets, and you may wind up putting together a migration plan that is sub-opti- mal. This can result in repeated rework, wasting time, money and resources. Migrating applications without con- sidering all the dependencies just won't work. Not having clear insight into the asset data will prevent you from doing a good job with migration planning. Follow this as a framework and adjust it to your environ- ment, choosing the processes and data analytics tooling that will get you the desired outcome: a clear understand- ing of the workloads, the assets planned for cloud migration and their relationships. Should you require assistance, a trusted and experienced migration partner can help you navigate the deep waters of cloud migration. SPRING 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 19