#10 – Move to the Right Cloud Platform
Cloud platforms are no longer restricted to the hyperscalers — AWS, Auze and GCP. The
new cloud adoption models include scalable hardware platforms for on-premises too.
Considering this significant change in purchasing and flexibility, IT teams must prepare
their application migration and refactoring programs for any cloud platform that offers
the right mix of considerations — cost, flexibility, security, risk, privacy, and a host of
other factors.
Your teams will need to consider technology, processes and people, to move application
workloads to the right cloud, and do it by leveraging a factory model. There is a deep
desire among many clients to adopt truly cloud native, agility frameworks. Most under-
stand the benefits of the cloud and have directed executive IT leadership to reduce their
costs and find consumption models — whether on-premises or in the public cloud —
that offer pay-as-you-go services.
To accomplish a solid reduction in TCO requires a significant migration of application
workloads to the cloud.
In our prior nine best practices, we have been preparing your team to move many hun-
dreds, if not thousands of applications. This requires a solid, factory approach to migra-
tion. Having determined what applications should move where, we set up the cloud
environment, secure it and prepare operations to receive the applications.
Since cloud platforms are not 100% backward compatible, we must decide if the appli-
cation can be migrated without change, or if it requires modification before the move.
Depending on the complexity, age and architecture of the application, the level of effort
to migrate to the cloud can range greatly. Therefore, we recommend an application
migration workbench approach.
Setting Up Migration Workbenches
A migration workbench is a team of engineers who perform a specific set of migration
tasks. There are six migration workbench types, as follows:
• Rehost – Generally referred to as “lift and shift,” this workbench is a machine-to-
machine migration of the application and data to the cloud platform. This is the
easiest of the migration tracks, and can be done using automation for most of the
tasks. However, you will not realize all the cloud benefits, because the applica-
tions have not been developed or rewritten for the cloud.
• Replatform – The replatform workbench is a team of engineers who perform
minor, but critical, replatforming functions to enable the application servers and
software to run on the new platform. Typically, this involves environment level,
not code level, changes, including:
• OS and/or database version upgrades
• Significant DNS and networking changes
• INI and configuration file changes
56 | THE DOPPLER |
SUMMER 2019