Serverless Basics: Cloud Migration
- June 14, 2022
As the name might suggest, cloud migration consists of migrating all your data to the cloud. The global pandemic accelerated the entire process of companies’ migration, effectively raising the need for such services. From databases, storage, and physical or virtual servers: data centers of your entire operation can be moved to reap the benefits of such transition. But the process itself isn’t as easy as we would like it to be, so here we’re going to discuss the process of your cloud migration strategy.
What is the Cloud
While our immediate association might be the floating beds in the sky – that is not what we are talking about. We are referring to the delivery of IT services through the internet. Maintaining local IT infrastructure can become costly, especially in industries where data can radically increase. Therefore, a simple solution is presented instead of spending a fortune on maintaining and updating your infrastructure: complete your on-premise to cloud migration process.
While the entire process can seem too arduous to commence, the benefits are well worth the trouble. We must examine the benefits against the challenges, as well as what are the best tools for implementation. To that end, you must define your transition’s purpose and what you hope to accomplish for your project and business needs.
Cloud Migration Tools
Whether you opt to go with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or any of the niche players, the looming question is what exactly you want. If you are looking for someone with decades of experience in the healthcare industry, you’ve come to the right place. We at Vicert already have experience in moving data to the cloud, and, specifically, we have expert knowledge in healthcare.
With so many cloud migration solutions, it is also important to understand what you’re getting when it comes to cloud computing. Usually, we can divide the basic services into IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a service).
There is also a difference in what type of cloud computing your projects require or what architecture you are comfortable with. We can further distill the deployment mode: public, private, or hybrid cloud, pending on your cloud migration process.
- Public cloud: the most economical approach, cloud environment shared between the clients and provided by a cloud provider.
- Private cloud: offered through the internet or private network: closed for the public and available solely for your purposes.
- Hybrid cloud: utilization of both public and private clouds.
Benefits of Cloud Migration
We’ve already mentioned that there are numerous benefits of this migration. Here we’re merely going to list the most important ones:
- Improved Scalability, Cost, and Speed of Delivery: apps built on the serverless cloud automatically scale and allow the developers to focus on the product instead of worrying about the infrastructure. Effectively, that means that both time and resources are saved.
- Modernization: with the cloud infrastructure, many technical tasks are removed. The utility of cloud migration strategies can be best evident in the example of patient portals. The portal can be managed with multiple services and scaled while sharing a central database.
- Care Transformation: with better technologies come better solutions. It is natural to expect that new models of healthcare delivery will evolve, improving the experiences of both providers and patients.
Cloud Migration Strategy
Back in 2011, Gartner identified 5 Rs of migration. Since then, with technological advances came the evolution of approach. That is why Amazon AWS now outlines 6 Rs of the process: Rehosting (lift-and-shift), Replatforming, Repurchasing (migrating to different SaaS, Refactoring, Retiring, and Retaining.
- Rehosting: rehosting is a useful tool to decrease costs. It consists of moving the local applications to the cloud environment. It can be done through tools or manually (if the customer wishes to see through the transition from their legacy system to the cloud)
- Replatforming: AWS cloud migration option that refers to minimal optimization changes to complete the migration but ultimately keeping the core architecture of the application
- Repurchasing: usually moving to a SaaS platform
- Refactoring: changing the architecture and development of the application due to cloud services available in the new environment. Typically used to address scaling issues or if the proper functionality of the application cannot be achieved in the current environment
- Retiring: sometimes, cloud migration means that not everything can come. When it’s time to go – it’s time to go. Simply discarding unusable legacies can drastically improve your future operations
- Retaining: other times, you just want to leave something as is, at least for now. Migrate what makes sense, abandon what doesn’t, and retain things in between
Cloud Migration Challenges
As it should be evident, migration is in no way easy. That means a standard set of challenges might prevent you from implementing and completing your transition. Here is a list of common obstacles that businesses face when trying to migrate:
- Cost: as mentioned earlier, the cost can scale rapidly without a clear goal or an idea of which parts of your legacy you wish to transfer. Considering cloud migration has a lot of components and that most cloud computing functions on a pay-as-you-go basis, it is important that you have a clear goal and budget in mind.
- Strategy: different applications may have different requirements. It is essential to rigorously plan the migration to ensure that no part of your dataset gets inadvertently left behind.
- Cloud provider: given the cloud’s versatility, providers often don’t have compatibility with different clouds. Due to this limitation of cloud technology, cloud migration can lead to vendor lock-in. Like other factors above, it is crucial to conduct due research to avoid finding yourself in the costly process of switching providers should they fail to meet your needs.