Matias Creimerman - Cloud migration and modernization effort

Cloud Migration & Modernization Effort
10 points to successful

I spent a lot of time helping teams and companies migrate
their important and core applications to the cloud.
It’s a hard process between company culture and technical
teams.
The cloud apps are built using technologies and tools that
weren’t mainstream three-five years ago.

Cloud platforms operate differently than in on-premise centers.
The cost model for delivering cloud applications is also completely
different and require several technical specialist profiles.
The best practices to build, test, deploy, and operate applications
at cloud have an important advanced, but most enterprises haven’t
kept up.

The most advance companies in technology needs skilled cloud
technologists and learn and teach their specialist day by day.
Keeping applications and data secure is getting more challenging in
cloud environments.
The software development paradigm has made a turn around software
engineering.

This allows a better use of the resources that will always be adjusted to
the demand and also proposes a new business model based on the
“pay-as-you-go”. Another great advantage is to be able to access the
service from anywhere and at any time. We can find clear examples of
these models in the online applications offered by Microsoft.

When we talk about cloud computing we must always keep in mind two
roles: the users and the providers of the services.

We can group the services into three categories, at the lowest level we
would have the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that offers a set of
resources (virtual machines) on which to run applications.

Then we would have the Platform as a Service (PaaS) which is intended
to offer an environment in which to run applications without having to
worry about the resources they can consume. Under a PaaS there
always has to be an infrastructure that supports it, although it would be
transparent to the application programmer who makes use of the
platform.

Finally, we would have the Software as a Service (SaaS), which is
intended to offer applications that can be executed on a platform or
directly on an infrastructure, which have the “illusion” of having unlimited
resources for its execution. This allows you to scale applications
dynamically based on demand without having to touch the code or
application settings. Microsoft, for example, offer office suites in Software
as a Service format.

Cloud benefits
-Easily maintainable and upgradable applications, services and
infrastructure
-Improved IT and network security
-Lowered operational costs
-Easier and secure data movement between applications
-Operational resilience improvements
-Workforce productivity improvements
-More business agility

Steps to migrate to cloud...

1) Determine the right applications to migrate
Your company may have many applications to migrate or want to
migrate all their applications, but it’s essential to make an analysis
of which should be migrated in the first instance.

You should consider the following factors:
Current applications status: is it well designed? Can the current
technology stack be migrated to the cloud?
Team skills: What skills are required to migrate each application?
Do you have them in-house? or do you need to acquire them?

Time: How long would it take to move the application?
Cost: What would it cost? Are there commercial-off-the-shelf
alternatives that could accomplish the migration? low cost
alternatives?
Business: Which applications are the most important to the
business? Which are the easiest to move? Which moves would
have the biggest impact?
What are the business stakeholders priorities? What is the
business impact on end-users?

2) Priorities
Identify the applications that would deliver the most benefits in the
cloud, the low-hanging fruit opportunities where you can derive
high business value rapidly, and the applications you should
NEVER EVER migrate to the cloud (maybe developing a new
application version or new business solutions)

3) Pick the right platform, deployment model, and tools
You need to figure out where your applications will go and what
tools you will use. You don’t have to use the same cloud platform,
tools, or deployment model for all of your applications, but your
clients will.

When you picking a cloud provider, you should ask:
–Cost: Client budget and base cloud provider services costs. Can
you forecast on-going costs?
–Popularity: Cloud provider services, community, support and
documentation.

–Availability of people: Is important the team knowledge about the
tools and the platform provider or how you train or staff the
professionals.
–SLAs: Provider SLA level is an important topic.
–Use case: Does cloud work for your use case? do you really
understand well enough to validate the need for a cloud platform?

–Lock-in: level of platform lock-in and will you couple your
application to that platform?
–Company politics: Favorite provider on the enterprise side

4) Deployment models:
–Public cloud: the physical hardware is owned by the cloud
provider and the applications access is public. It allows scalability
and resources sharing that a single organization would require a
very large effort.

–Private cloud: the physical hardware can be owned by the cloud
provider or by the client, its can be customized. The applications
access is private. It allows a strong security access for particular
data o applications that require own company access limitation.

–Hybrid cloud: is the combination of public and private cloud. The
access can be public, private or both. It’s used in cases where it
may be necessary to limit access to certain resources.

5) Technologies stack
You’ll need to select the technologies and tools you will use to
create your application like application life cycle, frameworks,
technology management, tools, programming languages, builds
management, code control, testing tools, automation, configuration
management, deployment services

6) Team specialization
–Team Training: Invest in cloud focused trainings (new languages,
new tools, new process, ci/cd, automation, testing, new data
engines)

–Team Ramp up & follow up: specialize your team and follow them
to train in technologies gap and to specialize each one in different
areas of cloud techology

–Cloud Specialist: Members specialized in cloud enviroments,
infraestructure, tools, support, and development lifecycle.
–Cloud Architect: Members specialized in software architecture
with cloud specialization, legacy application migration and in cloud
architectures design and process modernization.

–Cloud Leadership: Members specialized in lead development
team with legacy and cloud specialization.
–DevOps and/or NoOps Specialist: Members specialized in CI/CD
process, scripting and coding to automate manual process,
environments security and deployment pipelines, application
integration and infrastructure flexibility.

–Test Automation Engineers: Members specialized in testing
automation. Test architecture design, performance testing,
configuration management and manual testing agility
–Network Security Specialist: Members specialized in security
treats and in resolving security issues.

–Data Architect: Members specialized in data architecture with
cloud specialization.
–Cloud developers: Members specialized in cloud application
development.

7) Involvement of end users and stakeholders
The Continuous communication is the pillar for modernization
works. Your team will gain the ability to develop the features in
smaller batches more frequently, so is very important the practice
to include end user and stakeholder in each development cycle
day by day.

8) Agile + DevOps/NoOps process
DevOps and agile methodologies combines the development and
operations to emphasize communication, collaboration, and
cohesion between the developer and IT operations teams. DevOps
helps an enterprise deploy more frequently, maintain service
stability and gaining the speed necessary for more innovation.

CI/CD is an approach, where teams work together to produce
software in short cycles and then ensure that the software can be
reliably released at any time. A successful CI/CD process connects
the work of all (product management, architecture, software
development, QA, DevOps, Operations, Testing, Security and
Support). The result is an efficient, repeatable, cost effective, and
high-quality set of processes that deliver consistently great
applications.

A successful migration involves not only moving the application to
cloud infrastructure, but also modernizing the application. This
involves injecting modern technologies and architectural principles,
so that your team can continue to enhance and maintain the
application over time.

9) Fullstack development
The atomization of functionality, components and services and that
each one uses a different technology requires that all developers
involved know different and several tech stack.

It’s important know about frontend (web, mobile or any other),
about backend (APIs, microservices, data), about testing, know
how to automate, scripting, about infrastructure and about
operations and security.

It’s important know about frontend (web, mobile or any other),
about backend (APIs, microservices, data), about testing, know
how to automate, scripting, about infrastructure and about
operations and security.
This doesn’t mean that they specialize in everything, but they do
know how to interact with all this.

10) Fully modern cloud architecture with modernization
– Refactore code
– Refactore infraestructure components
– Refactore security
– Inject new modern software techniques

– Microservices to specialized functions
– APIs to manage data exchange between applications
– Modern analytics to maximize the insight
– Integrated several software products and components
– Implement agile, devops, cloud security, automation and
continuous delivery

Several companies are in the process of migration although among
the main problems are the difficulty of carrying specific applications
to the cloud, the insecurity that private data can be processed on
external machines (something partly re-curable with private clouds)
or the dependency of service providers, apart from that of internet
providers (becoming a critical parameter). All in all, and at the rate
that “cloud computing” evolves and improves, it’s expected that in
about 3 years 80% of the executive directors will be using “cloud”
technologies.

This content is property of Matias Creimerman.
Any misuse of this material will be punishable.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
About the author:
Matías Creimerman

Matias Creimerman - Cloud migration and modernization effort

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Was ist angesagt?

Was ist angesagt? (20)

Ähnlich wie Matias Creimerman - Cloud migration and modernization effort

Ähnlich wie Matias Creimerman - Cloud migration and modernization effort (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Matias Creimerman - Cloud migration and modernization effort