Cloud 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 final lecture of the course where I shall be reviewing some of the key points that we have looked at throughout these lectures.
We first learned that allowing enough time to correctly implement, test, and review our solutions, is key to a successful migration. It's important you define this time frame and have your milestones highlighted.
Next we looked at the importance of understanding what security you may need for legislative or compliance reasons and the different considerations when defining your security needs.
Such as what layers should security be applied to, network, user, application, and service.
Who needs access to the service, application, or data.
How will access be granted?
How much access do they need and to what level?
What other services require access to the service, application, or data and over which parts?
Does the data need to be encrypted at rest or in transit?
How will encryption be managed?
And what logging can be enabled?
Next we looked at what to factor in when considering a vendor and deployment model. This will very much depend on your business objective and what you are looking to use the cloud for. Remember to look at the range of services they offer, for what price, the security around these, and the interfaces they can provide.
We then discussed the various cloud deployment models. From private, public, hybrid, and community. Along a range of factors that help you decide which model to select. These covered, how sensitive is the data you are moving to the cloud? Are there any data retention requirements? Who will be accessing your services and data? How much will it cost to implement? How quickly will you need to scale your infrastructure? What sort of resilience do you require for the service? How do you intend to manage your infrastructure? Are you bound by specific SLAs for your service currently? What performance is required for your migrated services? And how much data you will be storing.
Next we looked at service readiness to see how to identify if your services and applications are cloud ready and how to achieve this. By looking at decoupled architecture, compatibility, performance and external dependencies.
Following that lecture, we touched on why it's important to adopt a new design during your migration. Allowing you to incorporate high availability, scalability and why it's important to design with failure in mind. Performing a lift and shift of your solution will not bring you the true benefit the cloud has to offer.
Next we covered migration and deployment options. Where we examined the differences between blue/green, weighted, and canary deployments. And the benefits of each. We also touched on how to move your data into the cloud through various means and how you could implement continuous integration and continuous deployment into your roll outs.
The next topic we covered was cost optimization. Where we analyzed each of these points of consideration in detail and how I could help you with your planning. Cost calculators, could budgets, billing alerts, billing reporting, re-sizing, storage, and tools.
Following this lecture, we then looked at business continuity and how to utilize the following models. Backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site.
We also discussed the differences between RTO and RPO. And how to use these when factoring in your business continuity plan and model.
Lastly, we looked at why it's a good idea to implement a proof-of-concept model before you roll out your full production live environment. To demonstrate its feasibility and that it works as expected. This also gives you time to correct any unexpected issues that may arise during your deployment.
That brings us to the end of this course. I hope the information provided has helped you gain a greater visibility of some of the considerations when creating a cloud migration strategy for your business.
Thank you for taking the time to view this course and if you do have any comments or feedback, then please do leave them within the comments section of this course. Thank you.
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.