Cloud migration is a process under which digital assets such as applications, IT resources, data and workloads are moved to the cloud infrastructure. Migration may also involve moving some assets or all assets from one cloud to another.
Moreover, with the steady decline in the cost of hybrid cloud infrastructure and cloud computing, most organizations have decided to migrate apps to the cloud. In this article, we will discuss some steps for the successful cloud migration app strategy for app migration.
Steps for Cloud App Migration
- Understand Applications
Before starting the migration process, you must first get a complete understanding of your app. Understanding your app platform becomes one of the main things to focus on. Application states that represent the locations where information is stored in apps, the amount of data to be transferred, storage requirements, network equipment, security, and compliance.
- Choose a Strategy for Cloud Migration
With the help of Time Quadrant, you can know what you can do with the components of the system. However, the correct migration strategy can be implemented by understanding the category of the app. There are 6 cloud migration strategies to choose from, including Rehost, Replaceform, Refactor, Retirement, Repurchase and Retain.
Apart from this, the most essential aspect of choosing a migration strategy is to use a dependency mapping tool to examine dependencies between applications.
- Understand Migration Success
This step is related to measuring cloud migration performance to achieve business objectives. There are different types of KPIs to measure when moving data to the cloud such as:
- Ratio between total request and error request
- Peak response time
- Network latency and memory usage
- Number of monthly billing and data exposure
- Frequency of potentially malicious and unusual user activity
- Select Cloud Environment
Before selecting a cloud environment, you must understand about the cloud model. You can choose either a hybrid model, public cloud or private cloud. Once you have selected the cloud environment, you need to choose a cloud provider. The major cloud providers are Microsoft Azure offering 99.95% SLA, Amazon whose web services have extensive technical documentation, and Google cloud platforms that increase high productivity.
- Automatic Migration
After choosing a cloud environment the next step is to automate the migration. The use of automation tools to integrate the success of migration projects becomes very important. The IaC tool is one of the automation tools that help transform manual infrastructure management using a high-level coding language.
The basic IaC tools are Google Cloud Deployment Manager, Terraform, Azure Resource Manager and AWS Cloud Creation. With this, developers can automate test-driven development (TDD), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous integration (CI).
- Conduct a Pilot Migration
A pilot migration is very necessary to check the efficiency of the migration strategy. With pilot migration, we can easily learn about the latency and performance of the cloud and take necessary steps if necessary.
- Migrate
Migrate is the last and most important step that requires you to move your data or users to the cloud after creating a successful strategy.
Conclusion
Migrating apps to the cloud is quite a challenging process. If you want to successfully migrate your apps to the cloud, you should follow the steps above for a successful and effective app migration process.