Cloud Migration strategy triumph begins with a plan

Cloud migrations can be complicated and risky if not done right. Similar to many things in information technology (IT), there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to moving applications to the cloud. In fact, an organization decides its application migration journey based on a range of factors __ starting from an application’s age and relevance, to whether it was built externally or in-house that will shape how it shifts to and performs in the cloud.

Despite the challenging journey, cloud migrations can bring significant rewards. For businesses to have a smooth and hassle-free shift to the cloud, they need to design a migration strategy, evaluate risks and plan for the unexpected.

Steps to Ensure Migration Success

Many organizations in India have reaped the benefits of scalability, cost-efficiency, and improved application performance by taking advantage of cloud migration. But migrating to to the cloud is a complex task and therefore organizations consider taking help of cloud migration service provider in India.

Whether your organization is moving to the cloud from an in-house infrastructure or from one cloud to another, it’s significant to understand the process and not have unrealistic expectations. Also, since not every app will gain from the cloud, make sure a migration is suited for your organization before taking the plunge.

Below are some pointers for a successful cloud migration.

Cloud Assessment Stage

In this phase, the cloud migration services team must map the hardware configuration of physical servers to similar EC2 instance kinds and assess the combined storage and bandwidth requirements. The fundamental questions to ask is – is it the right technology fit? Is there a critical business need the migration should address? Is there an immediate or prospective business impact the migration may have?

Proof of Concept Par

This phase will answer tons of questions and provide clarifications. Besides gaining familiarity about AWS, you can build reference architecture, develop a prototype, validate the technology and legacy test software while performing benchmarks and setting expectations.

Data Migration Phase

You can consider multiple options for data migration so that your applications can scale to your needs appropriately with minimal effort. To begin with, you will have to make the right tradeoffs among various dimensions – cost, durability, availability, price, performance, the size of an object stored, cache-ability, etc. to select the right approach. You can consider one of the several AWS strategies for migration that include:

• Shift to AWS S3 over the internet
• Using storage to move data to AWS Cloud and Back
• AWS Import / Export for relocating large amounts of data to AWS cloud
• AWS Managed Data Migration Services also help you shift data securely and efficiently to AWS Cloud.

Another option from AWS is a Managed Database Server called Amazon RDS. It comes as an easy to build, operate, and scale approach for relational database service. As a cost-efficient and hassle-free option, it supports all leading RDBMS including MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL among others.

Application Migration Phase

This approach involves three stages of execution.

• Forklift: Stray applications, compactly coupled or separate applications might be better served using the forklift approach. Rather than shifting portions of the system progressively, forklift or “lift it all at once” and move it to the cloud. The cloud migration service provider must create “cloud-conscious” layers of code as needed as well as design AMIs for each component to ensure flexible architecture.
• Embrace AWS: After shifting the application to the cloud, it might require minor modifications to improve cloud usage. Automating servers will not only help reduce operational burden but also enable leveraging more scalable storage.
• Optimize for AWS: Like with any other migration, optimizing the applications is must when using this strategy. In effect, you could redesign with AWS in mind, which may be high effort or adopt scalable service, which may reduce admin as well as fully utilize resources on a continued basis.

Leveraging the Cloud Juncture

Once the production site is released, you use some of the advanced features of AWS. By automating some processes, it could be easily “attached” to the topology. Forming an Auto Scaling set of web servers can enable you to provision more capacity automatically when specific resources attain a certain threshold (Apache web servers CPU utilization above 80% for 10 min).

Optimization Stage

During the optimization phase, you can effectively analyze utilization patterns and realize significant savings by switching to Reserved Instances4. The reduction in costs can be offset by purchasing more Reserved Instances like web servers and Tomcat servers. You can also integrate Amazon CloudWatch into your existing dashboards to help monitor the system metrics of every instance in your cloud fleet.

Conclusion

By complying with the above steps, you can switch an existing web application to the AWS cloud. With minimal effort, you can, not only be able to use the physical infrastructure for other projects but also, control the operating expenditure significantly.

Cloud Migration is a complex journey and must be treated with care. Umbrella Infocare is extensively experienced in cloud migration services and is familiar with common challenges of cloud migration in India.