Cloud development is now taking the application development and deployment ecosystem by storm. More and more companies are now migrating toward the cloud. Today cloud migration is a hot topic and tools are also available to help teams plan migration. But this process requires an initial check before making the switch. By carefully planning and weighing these checks, not just cost can be reduced but the product team can get the most out of the cloud offerings.
Knowing What You Want to Achieve
You have a great product and now you want to deploy it to the cloud so that end-users can get it in their hands. Or maybe you want to host the application from private data centers to cloud hosting. Regardless of your scenario, like most the organizations when migrating to the cloud:
- Are you looking for a hosting platform to reliably host your website?
- Are you looking for cutting the cost of infrastructure and deployment?
- Do you want to achieve the scalability of your services?
- Do you want to deliver your application to multiple tenants?
- Are you looking for other options than private hosting?
- Do you want to get rid of the infrastructure handling?
Migrating to the Cloud
1. Directly Moving to Cloud
The first way to move the application is to directly host it on cloud servers. In most cases, this migration will not need any significant changes to the code. The needed configuration should not take roughly more than a single sprint. These configurations may include connection strings, environment variables, network locations, and so on.
Make sure you plan accordingly to avoid missing deliverables deadlines.
2. Redefine Your Application
Prominent cloud vendors offer a lot of out-of-the-box solutions that you can adopt for your application. The value you get out of this application for moving to these solutions is that these services are reliable and are tested hence workload of development is needed. One such service is Identity and Access Management, which can authenticate and authorize the applications at the cloud application level.
3. Removing Not Needed Components
During the development of an application, developers can add components or workloads that are not needed anymore. During the application development life cycle, such components can be ignored. Such as some database that was used sprints before, and now is not needed anymore.
These components should be removed from the migration as they will add to the cost.
4. Adopting Cloud Services
This is an alternate approach and is interesting. Suppose there is an application that Is hosted privately. Now further suppose the development team can get a service from the cloud delivering the same functionality, one approach could be to shelf the entire service and adopt the cloud offering. This can add to the reliability of the application. But when if you are making a switch make sure you are not voiding any regulation.
5. Redesigning Architecture of Application
When you explore the offerings by the cloud, chances are that you can come across some offerings that demand to redesign of your application. This redesign may appear to be complex and time-consuming in the beginning but can significantly reduce the application cost and allow scaling of the application while improving the overall performance of the application. For example, one such architecture shift is to move from monolith application to microservice architecture to leverage the Kubernetes offering and horizontal scaling.
6. No Migration at all
I have included this as the last strategy and the reason is sometimes the careful assessment and audit of the requirements and offering reveal an interesting result: Don’t migrate at all. The most common reason behind this result is the regulatory requirements. For instance, financial applications are bound by many governments to keep data in the same country. Regulatory requirements also enforce those applications that they should not have outside network access and connection. Another reason is business operations maybe
Addressing Security Concerns
Iterative Nature
Cloud development and deployment is of an iterative. Once you have migrated successfully to the cloud, keep a check on the application insights and logs to know what is happening in the system. This is also helpful in knowing how many cloud resources are needed for the application. IF you have acquired more resources than needed, you can get rid of them straightaway saving yourself cash and investment.
Conclusion
In this post, we looked comprehensively at the application migration to the cloud and what to look out for when creating a strategy for the deployment of applications to the cloud. By carefully weighing the factors and knowing your objectives, you can define a perfect roadmap for your cloud migration.
