Cloud consulting

This is the first and the most important question one should ask himself before moving forward with the cloud migration.

• Will business benefit from cloud migration?
• Can current business situation afford cloud migration?
• Is there enough expertise in a team or is it possible to hire a team of specialists to maintain cloud environment after the migration?

These and many more other questions need to be answered before walking down the road of cloud adoption and migration

Complete cloud readiness assessment in order to properly estimate the status of the system and efforts needed to convert the application, infrastructure and business logic into the ones with full cloud adoption.
Perform thorough planning and define budget, deadlines and KPIs. Prioritize tasks and break down the go-live process to the smallest details

Almost all organizations face these problems:

• long time-to-market delivery because of poor understanding of what's going on within a team;
• error-prone infrastructure with millions of manual changes;
• no time to focus on business.

The timeline can be defined after complete cloud readiness and inventory assessment. If the applications and services don't need global changes and they are cloud-ready, the transition can range from as little as 14 days to over 6 months.

Cloud migration cost can be categorized based on three groups: Direct (TCO) cost, Indirect cost and Migration cost itself.
Direct cost can be calculated relatively accurately with various Cloud calculators (e.g.AWS,Google)
An example of the indirect cost might be the case when business lead puts a lot of efforts towards the migration and doesn't pay enough attention to the marketing which impacts the revenue
Cost of the migration includes, but is not limited to, data transfer from on-premises and to the cloud and the cost of expertise required to perform the migration.

There are 6 common strategies of cloud migration:

1. lift-and-shift is otherwise known as "rehosting" - literally the application is lifted out of its environment and shifted to the cloud or another environment. This method is the most primitive and fast but quite error-prone.
2. Re-platforming - the process of transition from one platform to another one. Replatforming may occur efficiently if you have legacy workloads and want to move towards cloud computing technologies. Another good reason is new benefits of another platform which would help to grow business.
3. Re-purchasing - shift to another product (usually SaaS).
4. Re-architecting - a new concept of application architecture and its development. Usually, this method is the most efficient since your service becomes more modern and cloud-native.
5. Retire - simply refuse from unnecessary services. Sometimes some services are just not needed and become a burden in your infrastructure. Save up to 20% by turning off useless services.
6. Retain - just do nothing. If the application is not ready for migration or there are no benefits and advantages for a business, you may better retain and delay the transition.

The migration strategy is chosen according to the state of your infrastructure and business needs and goals.

CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) and IaC (infrastructure-as-code) allow to provide the full automation of infrastructure, involve the best DevOps practices and implement release management.

Basically, out of our experience, we recommend the following:

• IaC: Serverless Framework, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation
• CI/CD: AWS CodeBuild/CodeDeploy, Azure Pipelines, Google CloudBuild
• Container orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker

Sure! KPIs allow to make the final results tangible and measurable. Efficiency metrics must be calculated and determined before migration and tracked on the regular basis. That's why we determine 2 types of KPIs: migration KPIs and post migration KPIs.

Here are some basic efficiency metrics of cloud migration:

Duration - how long does each phase of migration take?Cost - what is the final price of cloud migration (including direct and indirect costs)
Post-migration KPIs:
Availability - complex parameter that represents the overall system availability (e.g. 99.999 %)Reliability - system ability to perform at a certain level (e.g. website response < 4 sec) under the loadScalability - system ability to efficiently scale up&down and out&inCost - Infrastructure cost and trends. Average cost per customerSecurity - Number of vulnerabilities found, attacks mitigate