In the year 2019, more and more businesses are analyzing how they can move the workload from their on-premise server (or private clouds) to public cloud networks. They are inspecting the services of cloud hosting they can leverage. The top cloud hosting providers include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. These three public cloud hosting providers are crucial for digital business continuity, focusing more on use cases than the investment made in the architecture. Such cost covers any labour cost or manual task management.
However, the roadmap to shift to a public cloud is not that easy. It requires a proper plan and strategy in order.
Cloud Migration Risks
When migrating data-dependent applications to the cloud, there will always be risks involved. The move should impact applications in minor ways. Facing downtime while the migration is happening can result in the loss of customers and business reputation.
Before making a move, certain checkpoints should be set up to test application runtime in the new environment. Migration can be complicated as the data either resides on the virtual machine or the bare metal. Workload portability issues can surface, primarily related to applications and data, which can be addressed thanks to the cloud hosting providers.
Some organizations, strategize the move of sensitive information to the cloud. The concern is shared among the organizations that collect critical information of their customers. Institutions like, healthcare, finance, etc. particular checkpoints should be introduced to evaluate the GDPR or any other legal acts of data authority for a specific region.
IoT applications have been increasing rapidly, hinting the need for infrastructure sensitivity to latency. When migrating to clouds, issues can arise due to the distance from which data processing actions are required. Migrating latency-sensitive apps over cloud architecture might result in slight latency increment.
To counter all the IoT use cases, distributive cloud infrastructure could be a possible solution. However, it comes with potential drawbacks. If you decide to move your applications to a public cloud platform, some tweaking in the code will be required to support the distributed cloud architecture.
Another issue is vendor lock-in. If for some reason, you decide to shift your workload from one cloud to another, there might be vendor lock-in terms in application and data services. Before moving your complete data to the cloud, you can upload a small chunk and have that proof-of-concept (PoC).
Role of Containerization
Organizations choose to opt for containerization approach before or after moving to a public cloud network. Some of them go for containerized micro service approach. It allows them to maintain sub-services separately and reuse them in the main service application.
If the organization already has its workload in containers and are orchestrated on a container-based platform like Docker engine, migrating to the cloud can be more relaxed. Kubernetes believes in the fact that every type of workload should be portable.
To Summarize
As time goes by, cloud migration has become a dull task. Cloud hosting providers are offering container-based engines to ease enterprise into it. However, most of the challenges are handled by public clouds as well. Issues like vendor lock-in and downtime are yet to address.
