Moving to the cloud
Yeah! You've made the decision and are moving to the cloud. Time to pack your digital bags and move everything up in to the skies. But wait; what about that one application or this huge data set? Thats not going to work?! Don't worry; the solution is in your own hands!
In my previous post I wrote about the cloud and how you could segment your IT services to migrate them to the cloud. But how should you approach this. If you start to dig you find more and more services are directly connected to each other and that migrating single services is not an easy task. Also, you will find even more complex factors if you are using multiple datacenters right now.
The best start when segmenting IT services is to start from scratch. Get a blank canvas and ask yourself the questions you would answer when you where building the application from new. Focus only on this one application and try not to think of limitations. If you got this nice sketch of your application, go ahead and add relations to other applications to it. Keep it simple, only the important ones. The trick here is to not draw a technical setup, but a functional setup with focus on the information flowing between the applications.
With this drawing it's time to talk to your IT partner and show them the sketch. They will ask you a lot of questions on how this is working and why that is in the drawing etc. These questions help you think in the right direction and answer the technical questions. Together you'll make a blueprint of the perfect setup of your application. Then it's time to compare it to what you have now in your on premise solution and what has to be done to get to the newly designed version.
If you redesign your application from scratch, it not only makes it easier to segment it, but also gives you better insight in the data flowing from and to the app, why certain design choices are made and how this app can be improved in both availability and performance. When the app is segmented, you can put it anywhere, on premise or in the cloud.
When choosing the right cloud services location, there are a lot of questions to be answered. If you have applications running for users in different countries, it's best to place the apps and data as close to the user as possible. Don't try to deliver all from the cloud solution in your home country. Not only because you will have high latency on the connection to your end users, you are missing out on important local available cloud providers. In the end users country are most likely a lot of cloud providers with knowledge of the local market. This can significantly improve your apps performance and availability.
So, migration to cloud services can be a challenge; but when asking the right questions, having a good discussion and redesigning apps to prepare for segmentation it's doable. The key is finding the right partners in both your home country and the countries of your end-users. Get all people involved, share your total vision and design your cloud together!
Thoughts? Comments? Other approach? Please let me know!
