Cloud Migration best practices -part 6

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.

Testing: Evaluate how applications perform in the cloud

Testing your applications in the cloud before you officially migrate them is an important way to save time and mitigate risk. It gives enterprises the opportunity to easily see how applications perform in the cloud and to make the appropriate adjustments before going live. As mentioned
previously, some migration solutions provide a way to run clones of live environments in the cloud so you can do realistic testing but without impacting data or uptime of the live system.
While testing in the cloud, identify the key managed services you should be using from the cloud provider (e.g., Database as a Service (DBaaS), DNS services, backup). Review all the cloud environment prerequisites for supporting the migrated workloads like networking (e.g., subnets, services), security, and surrounding services.
In some cases, especially early in a migration project, it’s useful to run a proof of concept test for some of the applications you plan to migrate. These pilot projects will help you get a feel for the migration process. They also help validate two key migration metrics: The resources and capacity your application requires and your cloud vendor’s capabilities and potential limitations (e.g., number of VMs, storage types and size, and network bandwidth).

The more testing done in the beginning, the smoother the migration will be. We advise running tests to validate:

  • Application functionality, performance, and costs when running in the cloud
  • Migration solution features and functionality

Ultimately, this testing and right-sizing will help you capture the right configurations (settings, security controls, replacement of legacy firewalls, etc.), perfected your migration processes, and developed a baseline for what your deployment will cost in the cloud.

Contact us today for your FREE Cloud Migration Consultation!