Successful Cloud migration helps companies through their digital transformation journey by providing adequate services for businesses’ growing needs. Commonly, “cloud migration” describes the move from on-premises or legacy infrastructure to the cloud, but the term can also apply when migrating from one cloud to another.
Moving data to the cloud requires preparation and planning to decide on an approach.
This article discusses building an 8-step checklist to consider and address a successful cloud migration.
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Define the Migration Architect Role
Before initiating the cloud migration process, you must establish the migration architect’s role in leading the process. The migration architect is a system architect-level person responsible for planning and completing all aspects of the migration. The core responsibilities of a best cloud migration architect include:
- Defining refactoring necessary to make the migration successful,
- Designing strategies for data migration,
- Defining cloud-solution requirements,
- Determining migration priorities and production switchover mechanisms.
The migration architect makes many decisions and technical plans to ensure the project’s success.
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Choose Your Cloud Integration Level
There are two ways to migrate your application from an on-premise data center to the cloud:
- Shallow Cloud Integration
- Deep Cloud Integration
For a shallow cloud integration, the on-premise application is moved to the cloud, and no or little changes are made to the servers you instantiate in the cloud to run the application. Therefore, these changes are enough to get the application to run in the new environment.
However, the application is modified during migration to take advantage of crucial cloud capabilities for deep cloud integration. This can involve auto-scaling, dynamic load balancing, utilizing a colocation data center for hybrid cloud setups, or leveraging serverless computing capabilities such as AWS Lambda for application portions.
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Choose a Single Cloud or Multi-Cloud
Before beginning your PLM cloud migration process, you must determine whether you want to go with a single cloud provider and move your application to optimize for that single platform or run on multiple cheap cloud providers.
Optimizing your application to work with a single cloud provider is quite simple, as the team has only one set of cloud APIs to learn. But there is a downside to it as well—vendor lock-in. Working with only one provider makes moving the application to a different provider challenging. Having a single cloud provider negatively affects your ability to negotiate SLAs and pricing.
Build your applications to run on multiple cloud providers. This strategy allows you to run your application simultaneously on multiple providers or split your application load. This model allows you the ultimate flexibility in vendor negotiations because you can quickly shift loads from one cloud provider to another.
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Establish cloud migration KPIs
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics you observe about your application or service to measure performance against your expectations. The most suitable KPIs for a cloud operations process show how your in-progress migration is doing, highlighting visible or invisible problems lurking within your application.
Some of these notable KPIs include:
- User experience
- Lag
- Response time
- Session duration
- Application/component performance
- Error rates
- Throughput
- Disk performance
- Memory usage
- Network throughput
- Conversions and conversion percent
- Engagement rates
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Establish Performance Baselines
Baselining measures your application or service’s current (pre-migration) performance to determine whether its future (post-migration) performance is satisfactory. It helps you ensure the migration process is complete and validate the post-migration performance improvements you expect. It also enables you to diagnose any problems during successful cloud migration.
Define a baseline metric for every KPI that you’ve decided to measure. Establish how long you will collect data to define the baseline. Choosing a short baseline period lets you move faster.
However, you risk not collecting a representative performance sample. Selecting a more extended period to baseline takes more time but can provide more representative data.
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Perform Requisite Refactoring
Refactoring involves doing other work on your applications and services before migrating them so they work as effectively and productively in the cloud as possible. Some examples of this include refactoring your application to ensure:
- It works efficiently with multiple numbers of running instances to allow dynamic scaling, potentially saving money on costs
- Dynamic cloud capabilities, such as allocating and de-allocating resources as required, can better benefit resource utilization than statically giving them before time.
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Map a Data Migration Plan
Data migration is one of the most challenging parts of the cloud migration process. The location of your data can fundamentally impact your application’s performance and output. Migrating your data to the cloud when the data-access methods are still mainly on-premises can impact performance. Performance is also affected if the data is still on-premise but the service accessing it is in the cloud.
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Switch Overproduction
When and how do you switch the production system from the legacy on-premise solution to the new cloud version? The answer depends on your application’s complexity and architecture, especially the architecture of your data and data stores.
There are two common approaches:
- Do it all in one go. You can wait until you’ve migrated the entire application or service to the cloud and confirmed that it works to change traffic from the on-premise stack to the cloud stack.
- Do it slowly over time. Move a few customers over, test that things are still running, and then transfer a few more customers. Resume this process until you’ve moved all your customers to the cloud-based application.
The eight steps in this checklist cover much ground, but you should consider other things during your cloud migration process. For example, creating a secure cloud environment is a significant part of any PLM cloud migration services. The major cloud providers offer significant tooling and support to help you build and maintain a secure system.