Adopting cloud services through transformation, moving applications from on-premise, or hybrid cloud server to the cloud, poses strategy and technical challenges. With the new automated cloud tool and software products to solve the migration problem, planning sophisticated migration will be in demand and can even be the defining characteristic of a successful transition.
With everything said above, understanding the best practices for migration workloads, data, and applications from servers to the cloud will be a cost-effective and streamlined process.
For the moment, we will focus on cloud migration discovery and planning phase, including technical assessments, evaluations of hardware/software, and application dependency mapping. By investing in the planning phase of the migration, your chances of experiencing smooth transitions increase.
Evaluate and Coordinate
Understanding the factors that could affect your migration is extremely important for discovery and planning. Open communication and transparency between your technical and business teams are essential to ensure successful pre-migration planning.
Things to prioritize during migration, such as scalability, resolving functionality issues, and reducing IT expenses, can influence your decisions regarding the destination architecture, managed Cloud Hosting Provider, and the dynamics of the migration itself.
For example, if you are moving to a higher-traffic and scalable environment that would balance load among multiple servers, you need more advanced procedures such as load, stress, and performance testing.
Assess the Source Environment
During the discovery and planning phase, assess the source environment thoroughly. Review your current physical or hybrid Cloud Data Backup and create a detailed list regarding the applications, websites, workloads, databases, and other services you need to migrate. Categorize the application and web/data services with respect to type, functions, and priority.
Understand the type of server resources you would need to migrate things smoothly and provide insights to make decisions about the plan, scope, and cost of the shift.
Dependency Mapping
Determining the workload and server inter dependencies can impact your planning process in a powerful way. Figuring out the contours of web, data, and application services, especially components that depend on caching or DNS to function, determines the flow of your migration.
Documenting the service relationship before you make your move helps to identify tasks that can be performed parallel to save time and capital, and also ensures application functionality post-migration. To accomplish this, create a step-by-step checklist related to your migration.
Destination Architecture
While you are planning the cloud architecture, consider its technical requirements, such as availability, scalability, or elasticity, needed by the new cloud environment along with deployment and auto-scaling tools. Prepare a detailed architecture document, and obtain proposals from managed cloud hosting providers.
The OS upgrades will require manual migration process, “like-to-like” server migrations with OS that does not require to be upgraded can be accomplished with the help of some automated tools available in the market. A hybrid approach automates the parts of the process to reduce cost, complexity, and overall project timeline.
Contingency Planning
One of the most important parts of planning is to have a viable backup plan, such as the independent databases to store backup and ensure data integrity. In case anything goes wrong, you can mitigate the risks. Establish backups in the new environment, and implement disaster recovery plans and fail-over environments, if needed.
Sure it portrays more efforts on the front-end, but a thorough assessment during the planning phase can ensure seamless and stress-free migration to the cloud.
