Simply Cloud Concepts

There are the 6R's, and my adjusted list, the 3R's:

1. Rehost (lift and shift to Azure, AWS, GCP)

2. Replatform (Use services to rebuild your app in Azure, AWS, GCP)

3. Retain (keep on prem)

We don’t really need 6, its just more ways to make the cloud more confusing.  We need to sweep away all the propaganda making the cloud overly complex. 

The first issue is the name, "The Cloud".  It’s to generic, and everything is just called a "Cloud".  The Cloud seems like one place to people, it’s not.  Its servers run in data centers. Let’s start by just calling the Cloud, the place you are actually looking to purchase servers or services.  Ex. Azure.

Azure, at a high level is generally hosting your applications on someone else’s virtual servers in their data center.  To make it simpler, they have provided the option to use services instead of virtual servers.  They are a front-end GUI where you can configure services instead of servers and applications. 

You need a web server?  Instead get a "web service", sure it’s likely on a Windows 2022 server running IIS, but the interface is a different GUI.  Just configure what you need, Azure configures the rest.  No need to worry about the OS or IIS (versions, patching, upkeep, etc.) There are many services like this in Azure.  Instead of building the server and application, just purchase the service and let someone else configure and maintain all of that for you.  Amazon and Google have their versions of the same concept.  Instead of "Cloud", let’s just use their names.   Azure, AWS, GCP. 

 When you put stuff in the “Cloud", you do it 2 very high level ways.

1. Purchase virtual servers and move it the same way it is built on prem. (Rehost)

2. Purchase services instead of VMs, and build it using that. (Replatform)

 Saying "I moved stuff to the cloud", really means very little.  It usually means 'one of my staff did something, I don’t really understand what'.  Saying "I moved things into Azure, replatforming 6 different applications."  That is saying something.

Replatforming is heavy lifting, that is what is impressive.  Lift and shift is not heavy lifting, and generally not as impressive.  It might be a good idea, but it’s just not incredibly hard unless you are doing it at a large scale.  I will leave that topic for another post.  Anyone doing a large-scale move?