Cloud Migration Services

Despite the fact that cloud infrastructures may have certain limitations, there is an uncountable number of advantages, including:

• Great resource scalability, which means you can scale your resources up and down on demand and enjoy the autoscaling features. Autoscaling will help to get prepared for unexpected traffic spikes and decrease the downtimes ratio.
• Cloud enables smart infrastructure automation and becomes a single source of truth for an environment.
• “Pay-as-you-go” billing model ensures you pay only for the resources you use. There is no need to forecast the load and buy the resources upfront.
• Infrastructure hosted in the cloud enables you to use modern technologies and trending open-source tools. Such infrastructure is fully compatible with numerous ready-made tools and which can be easily integrated into your operations.
• Cloud computing lets you reimagine and transform the approach to product delivery. It allows your IT stuff shift focus from infrastructure maintenance to product updates and new features release.
• Risk management becomes as easy as never before because of smart monitoring and alerting capabilities that ensure your services are always up.

Most of the cloud migration service providers would consider the following aspects as restrictions of cloud migration:

• Not all applications are ready for migration upfront. It may happen that some apps will require slight amendments or even global changes in code and architecture.
• Lack, poor quality of absence of documentation will delay the cloud migration process because it will be harder to discover all the dependencies and service functions.
• Some outdated services can occur incompatible with cloud computing and will require full substitution or rewriting from scratch.
• If your databases contain sensitive information, confidential data under government regulation (especially in healthcare and banking industries), it may be prohibited for public clouds allocation. The good news is that the hybrid approach (cloud+server) is gaining more and more popularity.

However, our hands-on experience shows that those restrictions are no show-stoppers. They influence project budget and schedule hence you’d need to invest additional efforts into coping with those, but do not mean migration is not possible.

There are 6 core migration strategies called “6R”: rehosting, replatforming, repurchasing, rearchitecting, retiring, retaining. Only proper and thorough cloud readiness assessment allows to evaluate which strategy is the most optimal for your specific case.

Out of our experience, each IT infrastructure is unique and may require the combined approach, for example, some pieces of the application can be easily rehosted and some pieces will require global changes before moving to the cloud. It will help to meet your business needs, save costs during migration, and make the infrastructure more friendly for the cloud.

Along with DevOps best practices, proper cloud utilization requires infrastructure automation (infrastructure described with a code) and CI/CD pipelines to ensure smooth releases and on-click deployments. Besides, it is a good practice to use container orchestration tools like Kubernetes to ensure zero-downtime for your production environment.

Definitely yes. Popular public cloud providers like AWS, MS Azure, GCP meet all the security compliance requirements and specifications like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS. However, it is important that your GCP migration, Azure cloud migration or AWS migration partner is aware of your security concerns and takes appropriate measures to meet those requirements.

There are two types of KPIs for cloud migration: basic metrics and post-migration metrics. They are cross-functional and can be used for on premise to cloud and cloud-to-cloud migration as well as for hybrid cloud migration.

Post-migration metrics include service availability, response time under the load, scalability (up, down, in, out), cost, security vulnerabilities rate, and so on.

After migration, we suggest tracking most relevant KPIs from the list below on a continuous basis:

• Corporate KPIs: Perceived Load Time, ApDex, Error %, Mobile Crash Rate, Route Searches, Segments, Check Ins, Fare Class, Promotions, Point Redemptions, Complementary Services, Loyalty Program
• Application/Infra KPIs: ApDex, Availability, Throughput, App/API/DB Response Times, Error %, Memory Footprint, CPU Workload,Disk Workload, Network Throuhgtup
• DevOps KPIs: Builds, Commits, Deploys, Defects
• Web KPIs: Session Count, Session Duration, Page Views, DOM Readiness, Page Render, Perceived Load Time, Error %, ApDex
• Mobile KPIs: App Launches, User Counts, Load Time, Response Time, Crash Rates, Crash Locations, Error Rates (HTTP, Network), API Errors, Session Duration
• Support KPIs: Support Incidents, MTTI, MTTR, Cost per Incident