Companies that successfully make the switch have a lot to gain. Here are seven considerations we would recommend to any company looking to migrate to the cloud:
1. Get ready to shift your thinking.
Are you ready for a mindset shift? The cloud requires integrated solutions.
While in the past, development, testing, networking, security, infrastructure, and operations groups operated semi-autonomously, the best cloud architectures arise from people and teams working together on fully integrated solutions.
Businesses looking to make the switch may need to shift their thinking, as well as how their teams work together, to avoid making the cloud look like their old data center. The roles and responsibilities of development, operations, security, and infrastructure must fundamentally merge into a cohesive team that collectively builds and deploys solutions.
2. Need compliance and auditability? Build them in from the start.
For companies in the BioPharma industry or others in which audits are common, the most effective cloud solutions have compliance and auditability built-in. After all, if you can automate compliance, you can ensure your policies are being followed.
Better yet, if you leave appropriate audit trails with every tool (as is possible with automation), auditors can see exactly what happened and who did what, as you traverse the path from idea to applications deployed into production.
Keep in mind – manual solutions leave room for human error. Compliance is a lot easier to manage when the process is impossible to not follow due to automation.
3. Make sure that scaling can be done independently.
Understand what needs to scale, and make sure those components can be scaled independently from the rest of your application. Monoliths, or single-tiered applications, do not scale without significant cost and time – and they waste resources.
If you are not yet ready to scale, you might consider investing in a level of architecture modernization before moving to the cloud. One way to do this is splitting a monolith into distinct services. If all you do is lift and shift to the cloud, it will be more expensive and error-prone.
4. Have a strategy for diagnosing and remediating issues – BEFORE moving to the cloud.
If it is a burden today to figure out what is wrong when something breaks, with many people on a meeting to assess the situation, it will be worse in the cloud. Traditional logging will not be able to identify the cause of your problem, so you will need a way to gain higher-level insight into what is happening.
Telemetry must be built into your cloud-native applications. When you find the cause of a problem, you need automation to rapidly roll forward to a state that fixes the problem.
5. Repeat after us: nothing happens manually.
When starting out with the cloud, companies should use the model of everything-as-code, with everything under source control, and everything being peer-reviewed.
What does that mean for your teams? Nothing happens manually, such as logging into a box to reconfigure or patch something. It is all done through automation, and the automation includes tests to confirm that the change you intended happened as expected.
6. Move to immutable infrastructure.
“Nothing happens manually” means that you never upgrade or patch anything in place. If there are any changes needed once a piece of infrastructure (networking, servers, storage) has been established, that infrastructure is replaced, not changed. No more security patching, no OS upgrades, no more pushing dependencies to servers. Everything is created from scratch in each deployment.
This “immutable infrastructure” method helps ensure that there is no environmental drift, where things that were initially identical change over time. If you need a change, you will replace what is there with something new, created from scratch. By building and deploying this new element with your pipeline, you will eliminate a significant source of reliability challenges.
7. Consider a partner to help in your migration
Let’s be honest – all of these suggestions can be challenging, particularly if your organization has older applications. Often, these applications are not following modern application architectural patterns. For many companies, there is entrenched reluctance to change.
By having a documented desired end-state that represents where your organization needs to be in the future, you can use these principles to build a roadmap to modernize your technical capabilities – maximizing value delivery for your business.
As a partner in cloud services consulting, Eliassen Group has worked with large and small companies to create lasting change for 30+ years. For businesses looking for assistance in their cloud transformation, Eliassen Group experts can help to pave the way, providing the talent, training, and resources needed for success.
Our guest blogs are written and produced by organizations within our Chamber membership. The blog is not intended to reflect the views nor opinions of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.