Steps to the Cloud

While it is certainly important to select the right workloads or applications for consideration as candidates to move from in-house to externally hosted, private, hybrid or public cloud providers, the process should always be the same.

First, know why you are considering this strategy and clearly identify your goals. Are we attempting to improve service levels, reduce costs, provide for growth or achieve some other advantage in the market. This should be key in deciding what to move and when.

Once decided, the approach is generally the same. In a recent presentation I outlined three major steps.

Security is a binary decision. Management, regulators or application owners will either accept or refuse to allow data to leave the four walls. Assuming you pass this gate you want to identify the service providers who could meet your requirements. Choose SaaS, PaaS, IaaS or some derivative of these architectures. Decide on Private, Hybrid or Public cloud, shared tenancy or dedicated iron or other options.

At this point you can turn your focus to developing a cost model. SaaS is the easiest since you have a simple pricing structure. Take the number of participants multiplied by the rate card and you have a good estimate of the cost.  IaaS, however, becomes much more difficult, and nearly impossible to compare across a myriad of possible providers.

It is essential to understand the demand characteristics of your specific workload and to then measure how well the "supply" or capacity of the platforms being considered will be able to meet that demand. There are tools such as Krystallize CloudQoS™ which allow you to create a highly portable, synthetic workload to approximate your application. Armed with only a credit card you can then provision various machines, virtual or real, at any number of providers to create an index of performance and an accurate cost estimate. You can measure the performance in-house as well to determine relative performance once moved outside.

As an added benefit, you can employ this synthetic workload as a continuous benchmark, acting as a control to identify changes in performance in the underlying platform and the impact on performance of changes to the application.

Choose the applications to move for strategic business reasons, choose the providers for their capabilities to meet your specific demands and select the winner based on the best and most consistent price/performance for each individual workload. These three steps will get you up in the clouds safely.