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Don't Just Be "Cloud First" - Be "Cloud Smart"
Patrick Boren • June 24, 2020
How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud
Pertaining to all the ways of thinking about how you should migrate legacy workloads and applications to the cloud, today’s episode of the TexasPGB Blog is brought to you by the letter "R".
There is no one-size-fits-all cloud solution.
A mid-market business may have very intense technology and security demands; cloud workloads for large enterprises are quite different, typically multi-cloud and operating under different ecosystem drivers. Astute differentiation must occur not only at a technical level and operating costs, but also the roadmaps, vertical integration efficiencies, and availability of internal and external support services.
The business benefits of cloud adoption
are vast: reliability, modernization of applications and services, reduced operational complexity, and flexibility and agility to put your data where it needs to be, responding to an evolving business landscape.
“ The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."
– Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed.
While it's easy to just be "in the cloud" – that is worlds apart from building a performant, cost-effective, and secure cloud presence for a thriving business. The latter takes deliberation, planning, and expertise, and there are always additional factors to consider.
There are three core pillars that are foundational to your cloud strategy:
- Plan
- Execute
- Evolve
PLAN
It starts with thoughtful and comprehensive planning for your cloud objectives – so that your business gets better at it each from one evolution to the next. This Plan phase and its associated application classification will yield an overall framework toward cloud adoption – which will itself benefit you greatly as you go along:
- Effective prioritization of your apps makes it possible to distill an order of operations and focuses resources on what matters.
- Success breeds better organizational buy-in, helps you avoid common issues, and ultimately provides a smoother and more rapid execution – and it’s consistent and repeatable, so you reap maximum benefit to your business.
EXECUTE
We will now look a bit into methodologies applicable to how you Execute.
Back in 2010, Gartner published common strategies for cloud migration as their “5 Rs”. These are now very well-known and are:
1. Rehost – also called “lift and shift,” this consists simply running the application as-is, somewhere else. This allows a migration to scale quickly and realize cost savings without implementing any cloud optimizations.
2. Refactor – Typically driven by a strong business need to add scale, features, or performance, this approach entirely reworks how the application is put together to utilize as many cloud optimizations and efficiencies as possible. This method is generally the highest effort and cost compared with other migrations but can also be the most beneficial.
3. Revise – Support modernization requirements by modification or extension of existing code base, followed by Rehost or Refactor as a cloud deployment mode. This approach helps optimize the application toward the provider’s cloud infrastructure capabilities and characteristics, but such a development undertaking may be expensive, and revision takes the longest time.
4. Rebuild – Start over, remove existing code, and build your application on Platform as a Service (PaaS). Benefits are that you use entirely new code and frameworks and are able to consume cloud-native features to innovate, but also led to founded fears of cloud provider lock-in and unforeseen but now unavoidable consequences in the event of vendor technical or pricing changes.
5. Replace – Substitute your existing application with commercially available software delivered via a subscription model, or SaaS. This means there’s no development cost to you, and deployment speed is high, but challenges with access to data or becoming beholden to “that’s the only way this software does that thing we need” are possible.
Time passed, as it always does, and the current iteration is now “6 Rs” – first promulgated by Amazon
in late 2016 – which embraces and extends the 5 Rs and is now generally deemed standard in the industry.
1. Rehost – Same as previous.2. Replatform – Call this one “refactor lite”. Leverage of a few key cloud optimizations are made to directly realize some tangible benefit. A common example is migrating to database as a service (DBaaS) instead of a traditional database server with its associated licensing and operational investments.3. Repurchase – The new term for Replace.4. Refactor/Rearchitect – Unchanged from its previous definition.5. Retire – Often in larger enterprises, there are applications still in-service past when they’re useful to the organization, and these can be culled, resulting in financial and operational time savings.
6. Retain – Sometimes, it’s not the right time for a particular application or service to migrate. Maybe a particular application just underwent an upgrade, or the finance department is still depreciating the physical servers. You should only migrate what makes sense for the business, and revisit these identified applications in the future.
Cloud Rationalization
Never one to be upstaged, Microsoft added their own R to the mix, defining Cloud Rationalization
as, “the process by which you evaluate assets to determine the best way to migrate or modernize each asset in the cloud.“
Put another way, rationalization allows you to figure out what a potential future state might look like for any given cloud candidate.
The contention is that rationalization takes time because to be effective, it requires deep understanding of the workload and associated infrastructure pieces like applications, virtual machines, and data that application relies upon.
Today's blog is also brought to you by the number 10!
Emphasizing one of the points we mentioned above, Microsoft warns against delaying cloud adoption until all of your workloads are analyzed – it can take months or years to work through an entire datacenter, much less the entire IT estate of your company.
Instead, consider the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework’s concept of release planning by the Power of 10 Approach: Start with your first ten workloads. These are picked from your prioritized list and should contain a mixture of both simple and complex.
Here’s Microsoft’s list of The Five Rs of Rationalization, in their order. The definitions remain constant.
1. Rehost
2. Refactor
3. Rearchitect
4. Rebuild
5. Replace
EVOLVE
One final thought: Ongoing review of your architecture is an integral part of your Evolution phase. Cloud providers regularly release new services and features so it’s possible there are new ways of doing and optimizing things in the cloud that simply didn’t exist before. Having a defined cloud adoption framework provides a way to evaluate, review, implement, and refine your designs that scales with your business over time.
Connect with a cloud migration expert
to determine the best strategy for your organization.
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