Cloud computing migration plan: Introduction
Cloud Computing Migration Considerations
Cloud Computing Migration Course Summary
The course is part of these learning paths
See 1 moreCloud Migration services from your on-premise environment can sometimes be very simple and other times an extremely complicated project to implement. For either scenario, there are always considerations to bear in mind when doing so. This course has been designed to highlight these topics to help you ask the right questions to aid in a successful Cloud migration.
Within this course, we look at how timing plays an important part in your project's success and why phased deployments are important. Security is also examined where we focus on a number of key questions that you should have answers to from a business perspective before your Cloud migration. One of the biggest decisions is your chosen public cloud vendor, how do you make the decision between the available vendors, what should you look for when selecting you will host your architecture, this course dives into this question to help you finalize your choice.
Understanding the correct deployment model is essential, it affects how you architect your environment and each provides different benefits, so gaining the knowledge. I look at how you can break this question down to help you with your design considerations. We also cover service readiness from your on-premise environment and how to align these to the relevant Cloud services. Your design will certainly be different from your on-premise solution, I discuss the best approach when you start to think about your solution design, some of the dos and some of the don’ts.
Once you have your design, it’s important to understand how you are actually going to migrate your services ensuring optimum availability and minimal interruption to your customer base, for example looking at Blue/Green and Canary deployments. Cloud migration allows for some great advantages within your business continuity plans, as a result, I have included a lecture to discuss various models that work great within the Cloud.
Course Objectives
By completing this course you will:
- Have greater visibility of some of the key points of a cloud migration
- Be able to confidently assess the requirements for your migration
Intended Audience
This course has been designed for anyone who works or operates in business management, business strategy, technical management, and technical operations.
Prerequisites
For this course, it's assumed that you have a working knowledge of cloud computing and cloud principles.
What You Will Learn about Cloud Migration
Introduction - This provides an introduction to the trainer and covers the intended audience. We will also look at what lectures are included in the course, and what you will gain as a student from attending the course.
Time Management – How time plays an important part in successful cloud migration. We discuss the key points to allow time for and how to use it to plan a phased migration.
Security – This lecture will give you the ability to ask the key security questions to the business before performing a migration to the Cloud.
Selecting a Vendor – Here you will learn how to define the best way to assess which vendor would be a good fit for your migration based on a number of considerations.
Selecting a Cloud Deployment Model – This discusses different Cloud deployment models where you will understand the differences between them before gaining insight to the questions you should be asking before making a decision as to which to select.
Are your services ready to move to the Cloud? – This lecture will help provide you with the ability to identify if your on-premise applications and services are ready to migrate to the Cloud. There are a number of issues that could arise which we dive into.
Alignment of Services – Here we learn how to categorize your current services and how to map them across to the Cloud service.
New Design – This lecture discusses the importance of not performing a ‘lift and shift’ from on-premise into the Cloud. We look at how this design should be addressed using high availability and other Cloud characteristics.
Migration and Deployment options – Here you will learn the differences between the different deployment methods that could be used and how to tackle the questions around migrating your data into the Cloud to start with.
Optimization and Cost Management – Here we look at some of the considerations around optimization of your costs and how you can achieve greater efficiency.
Business Continuity – The Cloud offers a number of different DR methods which are discussed here and you will be able to define the differences between these and when to you one method over the other.
Proof of Concept – In this lecture, you will learn the importance of implementing a proof of concept design before your production migration.
Summary - Lastly, we will take note of some of the important factors learned from the previous lectures.
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Hello and welcome to this lecture on service readiness.
You would have most likely already identified which services you would like to move to the Cloud. However are your existing services applications cloud-ready? Now what do I mean by this? Basically, to be cloud-ready, applications need to be architected in a de-coupled structure. By de-coupling, I refer to the removal of the dependency of one subset of the application, part A, from another, part B. If there are parts of the application that are very dependent on each other than they can be classed as coupled; if one part changed, it would ultimately affect the other part.
Within the Cloud we should strive to develop de-coupled applications, as this allows different parts of the application to be scowed independently of the others, depending on demand, throughput, response times, etc. This allows far greater flexibility of the application to grow within the Cloud, instead of being restricted. Also having a loose de-coupling between components of the application, makes the whole application more reliable, as if one part breaks, it shouldn't affect the other parts.
Your application would still work if it wasn't de-coupled and you'd simply perform a lift and shift, but it would be far better to architect it in a way that allowed for flexibility, optimization and scaling.
Another point to consider is the performance of your service and application when it's hosted within the Cloud. Will it be able to attain the same level of performance if you needed to interact with it over the internet? Could this affect your customer's experience in a negative way? Look at your minimum performance requirements to identify if there could be any risks on this point. And look at ways to mitigate them. Sometimes the only real way to identify issues such as these, is to test it within a test environment on your chosen Cloud provider, and stress test the application and monitor its performance against your existing on-premise baseline.
Compatibility could be another issue for you if you have a number of legacy applications that rely on old operating systems or databases. Cloud vendors typically offer the latest software from an operating system and database perspective. So if you haven't updated your old legacy applications and services that you're looking to migrate, than you could potentially run into some issues. It would be a good idea to re-architect your systems to bring them up to speed with the underlying technology. Doing this now would enable you to make use of the new features and security services which could in turn increase the performance of your application.
You need to be aware of external dependencies that your services might be making use of. Perhaps a third-party performs some kind of data formatting on your behalf. So you'll need to consider how this same process could work. How will they access your data to continue the service? Could this service even be provided by another Cloud service? Analyze all external dependencies surrounding your migration services to ensure that access and connectivity methods are defined and configured.
That brings us to the end of this lecture. Next up we'll look at how to align your current services with those within the Cloud.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.