Cloud Migration Part – 1
To Cloud or not to Cloud
Many people face this dilemma while evaluating moving to Cloud from on-prem systems, and the greatest fear of not moving to cloud is lack of clarity; a move to cloud infra seems a daunting task which is kept on backburner.
Once upon a time (actually it is quarterly activity 😊 ), our IT Head Mr. Mohan compared and reviewed infra expenditure for all the application running in our Organization and he was surprised to note that we are running Peak load capacity even during lean business hours/months/quarters.
Obviously, we all but one didn’t had a good answer for this overspending and lost our bonuses for that quarter🙁; Nischay (Mr. Architect) suggested that we analyze the spends over the last year and provide the Peak business hours/months for each Consumer facing application that we had in the Organization, time was less and we all got down to work, the information needed was hidden in the dusty files and long forgotten archives but the Glaciers (AWS) were melt and Gold (intelligence) was dug out.
Looks like we had a mix bag of applications that had its own periods of Peaks and Lows, while some had fairly consistent workload the others were seasonal (harvest, holiday or exams).
Everyone agreed that there is a huge scope of savings that will not only optimally utilize the servers but also save on their maintenance and upkeep.
Nischay also suggested to analyze the option of moving to Cloud, the biggest advantage having no CapEx and no commitment of hardware. Moreover, he explained how the servers can be added and removed on the fly in the matter of minutes.
This surely enticed us to read and look into the advantages of the Cloud and we were confused and afraid of moving to cloud, we had so many questions and one lead to another.
With this great wall of Questions to climb we lost our interests and again went back to our daily rituals without thinking of the new possibilities and the savings that we were missing.
Days passed and no progress was made, one fine sunny evening Nischay realized our anxiety and suggested to take baby steps, he gave us a treasure hunt with great rewards and promised to get rid of our dark clouds.
Let’s see how many of these questions can be answered in one pomodoro (25 min).
- Is the Organization’s IT landscape predominantly on-prem or Cloud?
- Does you near future roadmap include multiple Cloud applications?
- What are the integrations outside your Organization ?
- How much Data heavy are you as an Organization?
- How many end Users directly connect to you on a daily basis ?
- What are the critical services provided by your Organization?
- Are connected devices, Bigdata, IoT part of your IT strategy?
- How do you manage data currently (analytics, reporting etc.)?
- Do you have applications that follow Microservices Architecture pattern ?
- Does your Organization plan to govern and monetize APIs?
Get an Answer to these questions and it will help you understand the current landscape of your Organization and remove the haunting clouds from your dreams.
This article is a memoir of our journey to cloud with wonderful team of technical experts at @TF who are now attempting to share their personal experiences and simplify the steps that are needed to move to Cloud and in-process answer the basic and advance questions necessary to make a decision.
Some inclinations to move to Cloud could be, (Let’s be honest, ours is to get our bonuses back)
- Broader reach
- Easier mobile access
- Business agility and flexibility
- Improved security and alertness (no need to pull the plug)
- Improved responsiveness
- Better analytics on application usage
- Improved availability, resilience and disaster recovery
- Reduced and/or re-allocated costs
Most of these objectives are well matched with Cloud features and characteristics (at least unless we learn to read the AWS bill, this should be a separate Diploma course)
- Elasticity
Ability to rapidly scale the IT infrastructure up and down to match changing requirements and business needs, A cloud computing environment offers increased resources utilization easily by designing applications that can spread their workload across multiple servers, this too being dependent on load dynamics matching the current usage.
2. Pay-as-you-go vs install-and-own
Doesn’t require an upfront capital, infra can be procured as need be, smaller organizations face much lower costs as compared to pre-cloud era.
- Organization streamlining
“Platform as a Service”, “Software as a Service” and “Infra as a Service” can be easily setup, no need for specialized in-house IT skills.
(Our answers from Team-Leads, Aparna, Prashant, Vinayak and Mohit in the next part, we have our hits and misses but, in the end, it is all good fun; hopefully this blog series will help others in their endeavor to AWS / Azure / GCP / Linode)
We are sure for some apps it will make sense to migrate to cloud while for some on-prem could be the optimal solution, do check our related article on the matter How hybrid mode in Cloud strategy can be life saver.
This series will have a practical approach where we will have quizzes and exercises and it attempts to answer all the open threads in the subsequent chapters.
Until next time, That’s all folks!!
