Cloud Hosting

Key Takeaways

Being Cloud Native is often considered crucial for business success in the current business landscape. However, the perception of becoming Cloud Native as a drastic change for a business might not necessarily be accurate. In this article, we will delve into the concept of Cloud Migration and its effects on the IT support infrastructure of your business.

Cloud refers to a network of remote servers that are accessible through the internet, where organizations can rent infrastructure and services from a Hyperscaler on a pay-per-use basis.

There are three main types of Clouds:

Cloud Native services refer to applications and services that are built, deployed, and run on the Cloud. These services are designed to take advantage of the features and capabilities offered by the Cloud, such as scalability, high availability, and elasticity.

A Cloud Provider is a company that provides Cloud-based infrastructure and services to organizations. These services can be rented on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing organizations to save on both the upfront and ongoing costs associated with building and maintaining their own infrastructure.

The Cloud Provider is responsible for hosting the infrastructure and investing in the necessary upgrades and maintenance. This includes investing in hardware, software, and personnel to ensure that the services remain secure and reliable. The costs associated with these investments are passed onto the consumers through operational expenses rather than capital expenses.

In the long run, it is often more cost-effective for organizations to rent the services they need from a Cloud Provider, as it enables them to avoid the upfront costs of building their own infrastructure. Additionally, organizations can scale up or down as needed without incurring the costs of adding or removing physical hardware.

In conclusion, using a Cloud Provider provides organizations with access to a range of IT resources and services without the burden of owning and maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

Cloud Native Services are those services and infrastructure specifically designed to run on cloud platforms, hosted and maintained by Cloud Providers. These services can include a variety of offerings, such as virtual machines (VMs), application servers, VPNs, load balancers, routers, databases, and disk storage. They can be divided into three main categories: compute services, network services, and storage services.

Cloud native services provide a powerful and flexible infrastructure that can help organizations to modernize their applications, improve scalability, and reduce operational costs.

Cloud Migration is about moving all or parts of your data, infrastructure, or compute services to a cloud provider.

Here is an overview of the 6-Rs approach to Cloud Migration planning: Migration Types

Throughout the entire project, it is essential to continuously monitor and manage the cloud environment to ensure that it remains secure, cost-effective, and aligned with the business objectives. This may involve ongoing maintenance and support, as well as periodic optimization and updates to the infrastructure and applications. The typical methodology for a cloud migration involves several key stages, including:

Discovery: Discovery is used to define the business and technical case/scope, plus assets to migrate.

Assessment: Assessment is used to plan the migration and see potential methods of execution.

Migration: Migration is used to run the planned migration steps, both technical and organizational.

Run State: Designated run team maintenance going forward.

When you migrate, what do you typically migrate or set up? The following is a sample of the common ones:

Migration use cases are specific scenarios or situations where a business may need to migrate their IT infrastructure and services to the cloud. These use cases can vary depending on the type of business and the current state of their IT infrastructure. A variety of use cases can drive cloud migration and technical scenarios, including:

Firstly, lets look at some of the options for Data Migration.

Static Data:

File Data:

(No)SQL Data:

Secondly, lets look at some of the options for Network and Topology migration.

Network migration is usually the most manually intensive as it requires mapping physical infrastructure and topology to cloud provider-specific IaaS. A typical approach might be:

Lastly, lets look at some options for Compute Service Migration.

Compute migration deals with migrating application servers, applications, and server clusters to the cloud. It is not just about migrating infrastructure but can also be about refactoring service architectures for cloud as well. Common approaches are:

Rehost:

Re-platform:

Refactor:

Docker and Kubernetes are two critical technologies you need to be aware of to benefit from migrating your applications to the Cloud.

Containerization and Docker:

Kubernetes:

Lets take a closer look at the business impacts of cloud migration, both positive and negative.

Like any organizational change, potential impacts need to be considered.

Positive Impacts:

Negative Impacts:

Business

Technology

Migrating to the cloud may seem intimidating at first, but with careful planning and the right resources, it can be a straightforward and relatively painless experience.

Key things to remember: When looking at Cloud Migration, it is essential to remember the following points and the mental maturity model.

Cloud Services refer to managed infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) offerings that are hosted in the cloud. Cloud Migration involves transferring data, infrastructure, and applications to these managed services in the cloud. A successful Cloud Migration strategy must consider technical and business objectives and prioritize incremental migration based on business priorities. Utilizing rehost, re-platform, or hybrid cloud strategies can help minimize the work involved in the migration process. Although refactoring migrated services can help optimize their use of the cloud, it is not an essential step. If you plan it right, you can do it in small bits at a time and still get great benefits.

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Migrating to the Cloud: Is It as Intimidating as It Appears? - InfoQ.com