This blog series will discuss the best practices employed by our technical team when they are engaging into a cloud migration project. The following content has been adapted from a Cloud Migration Whitepaper authored by Google.
Migration solutions
There are two primary architectures for cloud migration solutions that exist today: Replication-based and streaming-based.
Replication-based migration tools are typically re-purposed disaster recovery tools that essentially “copy and paste” applications and data into the cloud. Example steps from a replication-based solution include:
- Install an agent on the source and/or destination systems
- Replicate some or all of the dataset, which can take between hours to weeks depending on network bandwidth and the solutions’s transfer optimizations, if any
- Install an agent on the source and/or destination systems
- Replicate some or all of the dataset, which can take between hours to weeks depending on network bandwidth and the solutions’s transfer optimizations, if any
Streaming-based migration solutions are typically a more effective approach for live and/or production applications, especially when you don’t want to wait until all the data is moved before you can test or begin running your app. The streaming approach moves just an initial subset of critical data into the cloud so that your application can begin running in the cloud within minutes. Then, in the background, your migration solution continues to upload data into the cloud and keeps the on-premises data synchronized with any changes made in the cloud. This can save tens or hundreds of hours during a migration project often making streaming-based solutions significantly faster than replication-based.
Ideally, it’s important to have answers to the following questions so that you are clear about what features and functionality you consider important for your the applications you want to migrate.
- Agents: Many Replication-based architectures require installing agents in each application and/or in your cloud target. Is this true for the cloud service you’ve chosen? Will you need access to each application’s systems? This installation and removal can add time and complexity. If you’re moving a lot of applications, an agent-less solution may be a better fit.
- Testing: Does the solution offer a way for you to test applications before they are migrated without taking production and/or live systems offline? Without the need to transfer into data sets to the cloud first? Can you change cloud instances on the fly to test different configurations?
- Rightsizing: Will you get analytics-based recommendations for how to map on-premises instances to cloud instance types, optimized for either performance or cost?
- Migrating Apps and data: Does the system handle just the data migration or can it also handle moving the application? Can the application run in the cloud while migration takes place? How much downtime will there be? Is it up front, predictable, and/or short? How will the system support multi-tier applications that require orchestrated shutdown and restart and systems being moved in a specific order?
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