Cloud Migration
What is Cloud Migration
In very simple terms, Cloud Migration is the process of moving applications and Infrastructure (On-premises or from another Cloud provider) to the Cloud provider of your choice. It gives organizations the flexibility to lower costs, become agile, increase availability, reduce latency and reap all the benefits of the Cloud.
Migration Process
Like any other process, Cloud migration also follows a set of predefined steps, that the Organizations adopt according to the scope of their migration. AWS, GCP and Azure follow a set of best practices outlined as successful migration practices. I’ve broken those steps down into simple buckets:
Assess
In this phase Organizations assess their data, infrastructure and dependencies. There is a thorough assessment of the existing and new environment to establish dependencies, ownership and performance expectations.
Mobilize/Plan
This step simply involves a lot of planning of the workloads and migration process. It includes security and identity management, understanding the organization structure, networking, sorting apps, and developing a workable migration strategy.
Migrate/Deploy
This phase is all about designing, implementing and executing the migration process to move workloads to the new Cloud provider. Depending upon the migration strategy chosen, Organizations might also need to design/refine the Cloud infrastructure to adapt well with their new needs.
Optimize/Modernize
After moving all the applications and infrastructure to the Cloud, it’s important to take full advantage of all the cloud native features and improve performance, scalability, disaster recovery, and later leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. This step also deals with ensuring security and use all the built in cloud features to enhance performance.
Since AWS, GCP and Azure have their own terms for this migration process, I’ve created an infographic organizing the terms into the process buckets mentioned above.
Migration Strategy
There are different ways orgainzations can migrate their data, depending upon the nature of the applications, pace, security and appetite for change by the management. I’ve created an infographic of the six migration strategies that AWS, GCP and Azure suggest as best practices to users moving their data into the Cloud.
Since AWS, GCP and Azure use their own terms for each of these migration strategies, i’ve created an infographic organizing them into the buckets mentioned above. This would help us understand the various terms and jargons used by the Cloud providers in simple terms, and map them to the migration strategy into simple buckets.
Additional Resources
Readings
Azure Migration Strategy- https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/azure-migration-strategy-four-steps-to-the-cloud
AWS Migration Whitepaper- https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Migration/aws-migration-whitepaper.pdf
AWS Migration Process- https://aws.amazon.com/cloud-migration/how-to-migrate/
Google Cloud Platform Migration- https://cloud.google.com/solutions/migration-to-gcp-getting-started
Useful Courses
Migrating to Google Cloud- https://www.coursera.org/learn/migrating-to-gcp
AWS Fundamentals; Migrating to the Cloud- https://www.coursera.org/learn/aws-fundamentals-cloud-migration
Migrating Servers to Azure- https://cloudacademy.com/course/migrating-servers-to-microsoft-azure/introduction/
