Migrating to the Cloud - Where to Start?

By David Bird - AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Get the Biggest Benefits.

Many business owners have heard of the financial advantages of running computer systems in the cloud as opposed to continuing to make capital investments in their own computer department equipment. However the idea of migrating all of their systems over to a new platform can be pretty scary. And it’s true, if it’s not done properly, the initial costs can be very expensive and catastrophic down-times could be experienced.

One shrewd way to avoid these problems is to start with a hybrid system.

The hybrid environment means keeping some or most of your computing on premise (or in your existing data-centre) and just moving some of the functionality into the cloud to begin with. Maybe that sounds even more complicated? Let’s take a look at one cloud service that your business can benefit from very easily.

Migrating your customer-connect-point into the cloud.

In most cases your online customer-connect-point is going to be be your website address.

And that website address is usually going to be directed to your web-servers. If your business enjoys a lot of traffic, then you will have several web-servers with a load-balancer sharing the traffic between the servers.

What happens when you do a major promotion? Can your web-servers cope with the influx of traffic. If they do easily cope, that’s great in one way but of course it means that most of the time you are very much over-provisioned and are therefore paying far more for services that you are not using. If the web-servers don’t cope, then you could lose a lot of business from dropped connections.

By making use of a Cloud CDN (content delivery network) that sits in front of your load-balancer and web-servers you can absorb the impact of a large increase in traffic. This means that you can run promotions without worrying about scaling up resources to cope with the increase in traffic.

Amazon's CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When one of your potential customers requests content that you're serving by means of CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest time delay, so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.

CloudFront also caches content on these edge locations, so the next time (probably just a few seconds later) that a different customer requests that page, it is already at the edge location ready to be served. This caching therefore reduces the load on your web-servers as content is delivered to the client without needing to send a request to the server.

Combining CloudFront with Amazon's DNS service, Route 53, makes perfect financial sense and is an easy, first step in migrating to the cloud.

David Bird

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional