Cloud Migration Strategies: Framework and Cloud Models

Cloud Migration Strategies – Cloud advancement methods combine a system and specific cloud models to help firms successfully move their IT foundation and apps to the cloud. These strategies are critical for ensuring a sound development strategy and leveraging the benefits of cloud computing. The cloud improvement strategy system is constantly solidifying essential phases such as evaluation, arranging, execution, and optimization. Here’s an overview of cloud migration strategies, framework, and cloud models:

Cloud Migration Strategies – Outlook

Organizations examine their present foundation, applications, and conditions in the center of the assessment process to choose the most astounding approach for improvement. The organizational plan includes describing the development process, identifying appropriate cloud models, and establishing timetables and asset requirements.

The execution orchestrate is responsible for carrying out the improvement plan, which may include rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, repurchasing, or removing programs.

Private cloud provides advanced management, security, and customization options. Crossover cloud combines the benefits of both open and private clouds, whilst multi-cloud consolidates workloads by employing several cloud providers. The appropriate cloud display is determined by characteristics such as information affectability, administrative compliance, flexibility requirements, and cost considerations.

Organizations may complete an efficient and useful cloud migration by adhering to a well-defined strategy and picking the appropriate cloud models, allowing them to harness the full potential of cloud computing for their business operations.

What is Cloud Computing

Cloud computing refers to the transmission of computer assets such as servers, capacity, databases, software, and organization through the internet. It allows clients on-demand access to a common pool of customizable computing assets that can be swiftly provided and discharged with little organizational effort.

The primary idea of cloud computing is around the idea of outsourcing IT framework and organizations to a third-party supplier, who maintains and organizes the basic equipment and software. This allows organizations and individuals to focus on their core competencies without the hassle of maintaining and operating their claim IT system.

In other words Cloud Computing is a large on-demand resource pool of storage, compute, and networking that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal service provider interaction. Organizations are rapidly adopting cloud computing services for scalability, elasticity, and agility by migrating business applications from on-premises massive and expensive data centers to enterprise-class cloud and leveraging pay-as-you-go services.

Key Business Drivers for Cloud Adoption

There are many business factors that are driving organizations to adopt a cloud migration path, with the following benefits:

• Cloud computing allows businesses to innovate their applications without focusing on infrastructure and platform operations.
• Unmatched availability, scalability, and agility of cloud resources help organizations achieve faster disaster recovery and seamless business continuity by relying on an always-on infrastructure provided by the cloud service provider.
• On-demand usage and the pay-as-you-go cost management model offered by cloud services help organizations convert huge CAPEX spends into smaller chunks of OPEX. It also allows organizations to leverage their latest services for an optimal hybrid architecture.
• Organizations can reduce environmental waste and their carbon footprint by reducing hardware and physical products.

The Four Stages of Cloud Adoption

Being a one-step process, it is very common for an organization to decide to move to the cloud and launch right away. The following diagram shows a typical four-step process for a cloud deployment strategy.

Cloud computing has several advantages, including increased flexibility, adaptability, cost-effectiveness, and improved cooperation. It enables clients to scale their assets up or down according on demand, pay as if for the assets they debilitate, access apps and information from anywhere, and interact in real-time.

Seven Strategies for Cloud Migration ( The 7 R’s) : 

Migration, the third stage in the cloud adoption process, decides how to move critical business applications currently deployed in on-premises environments to the cloud.

The 7 Rs, also known as the 7 migration strategies, are a set of approaches commonly used to migrate on-prem workloads into the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. These strategies help organizations determine the most suitable method for migrating their applications. The 7 Rs are:

Understanding the 7 R’s

Every AWS migration strategy has its own journey, and the diagram below should help you understand the required steps.

1. Replatform (also known as “lift and Reshape”): With this strategy, applications are migrated to the cloud, but some modifications are made to leverage the cloud-native capabilities and services. It might involve migrating to managed services like AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) or AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
2. Rehost (also known as “lift and shift”): This strategy involves migrating applications to the cloud without making any significant changes to their architecture. It often involves using services like AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to replicate the existing infrastructure in the cloud. For the majority of applications, this type of strategy is also the first step because it’s easier to optimize or re-architect them once they’re already running in the AWS Cloud.
3. Repurchase (also known as “drop and shop”): In this strategy, organizations choose to replace their existing applications with commercially available software as a service (SaaS) solutions. It involves adopting cloud-based alternatives for specific functionalities or entire applications.
4. Refactor (also known as “re-architect”): This strategy involves making significant changes to the application architecture to optimize it for the cloud environment. It often includes re-designing the application to leverage cloud-native services, such as AWS Lambda for serverless computing.
5. Retain: This strategy implies keeping certain applications or workloads in the on-premises environment while selectively migrating others to the cloud. It is commonly used when organizations have specific reasons or dependencies that require keeping certain applications on-premises.
6. Retire: This strategy involves identifying and decommissioning applications or workloads that are no longer needed. By retiring these applications, organizations can reduce complexity and save costs.
7. Remediate: The remediate strategy involves addressing any technical or architectural issues in existing applications before migrating them to the cloud. It aims to resolve issues that might hinder a successful migration or optimal performance in the cloud environment.

These migration strategies offer different levels of complexity, effort, and benefits, allowing organizations to choose the most suitable approach based on their specific requirements and constraints.

Comparison of the AWS 7 R’s strategies

These strategies differ in their complexity, opportunity to optimize, and effort (money and time). The graph below should help you understand which of the strategies is easiest and which is more complex.

With its widespread acceptance, cloud computing has evolved into a critical innovation that supports many applications ranging from online enabling and information capacity to simulated experiences and the internet of things.

Selection of cloud model : 

Organizations make decisions based on business requirements to select between below cloud models

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):  This computing model provides the infrastructure to run the applications. Assets such as software & hardware, storage & networking are made available by cloud providers. This model is best suited if you plan to rehost or re-platform the applications.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS):  This is a blend of Infrastructure as a Service and a set of deployment tools, software development, and middleware that enable quick migration , best suited for refactor or rebuild applications.
• Software as a Service (SaaS):  Organizations looking to replace their applications with off-the-shelf alternatives can choose SaaS services. The cloud provider takes care of both infrastructure and the application that organization uses.

Conclusion : 

This decision always depends on the specifics of application and its business need. Making the right decision also involves understanding and discovering the current footprint, which applications to retain, which to retire, and which ones to consider for cloud migration. For each application, determine the appropriate cloud migration path, keeping in mind the effort involved and the costs that will be incurred during the migration journey.