Cloud Migrations: The Easy Way and the Right Way
I've witnessed an uptick in conversations with SaaS providers looking to modernize their core revenue-generating services. These applications are often hosted in a colocation facility on depreciating hardware assets, and so a compelling event is near: does it make sense to continue scaling up and out on metal, or is there a better way?
Evaluating the Landscape
If your application is built on a modern development platform, it is worth evaluating hyperscale providers like Azure, AWS, Google and Oracle. During evaluation, you'll notice some similarities as compute, storage and networking are largely commoditized across providers. Where they really differentiate is in the platform-centric tools and services provided to developers and infrastructure teams alike. If your business is built around software delivery, evaluating a potential cloud solution through a development lens is absolutely critical. If your applications and services are moved correctly, developers will have the most interaction with the cloud platform, anyway!
The Easy Way: Familiarity Breeds Contempt
After years of running infrastructure in a colo facility, you are likely familiar with the mundane tasks of managing virtual machines, networks, SANs, and other foundational systems that rob time from the real core of your business: applications and data. Unfortunately, running this way is comfortable and known! Sure, you have to patch, secure, and ensure uptime of 50 virtual machines and their respective hosts, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
This is why the deceptively easy way to migrate is fork-lifting those virtual machines out of your colo and into public cloud du jour. By doing so, you immediately unshackle yourself from SOME infrastructure responsibility including power, cooling, RAM and HD swapping, etc. Beyond that, you're still running the same on premises playbook from a patching, monitoring, DR and security perspective. Also, you may experience a common cloud reality: moving VMs into IaaS does not mean you'll save money and in fact, the bill may be higher in some scenarios. If you're pursuing a "lift-and-shift" strategy, rightsize your virtual machines so that your IaaS VM equivalents aren't over-provisioned.
The Right Way : Fall in Love with Your App All Over Again
After avoiding a boondoggle, you head back to the drawing board and take stock of your options. You know you have a talented development team leveraging modern tools and methodologies only to be confined to traditional infrastructure. Given the age of this hardware and your colo contract coming up for renewal in a year, you decide to partially refactor the application to take advantage of Azure PaaS services. By leveraging Azure SQL and Azure Web Apps, you have abstracted most of the underlying infrastructure and already taken major scaling, monitoring and high availability decisions off your plate. Better still, you're paying variable and transactional resource costs instead of fixed hourly compute prices. You know that there is still more optimization to be done, but this is a fantastic start and you're already spending less time caring for infrastructure!
Oh, Just Sprinkle on the Magic Cloud Dust?
If "the right way" sounds simple, know that I left out months of deliberate planning, testing and phased deployment in this process. This also assumes your organization has the necessary PaaS-centric development skills and understands the various platforms. If it does, you can harness these skills to completely transform the foundation of your business while looking like a hero in the process. If your business lacks those today, we can help! CDW launched Cloud Consulting Services to not only help you craft a migration plan, but also augment the skills of your developers and systems teams alike.
Real transformation happens at the code level. Take stock of which internal applications are due for modernization and let us help you get there!
