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Beginning Your Cloud Journey: Foundations

After much deliberation, you have decided to move your applications and infrastructure to the cloud, but where do you begin? You are already aware of the potential cost savings, faster (and more reliable) performance and unmatched scalability that the cloud can offer. Congratulations, you have already taken the first step, but where do you go from there? Your technical staff has little to no true production experience with the cloud, but they are also eager to make this migration. We can help! We have been migrating customers to the cloud since 2013 and we have scars to show for it. No matter how simple or complex your technical landscape is, we can get you there.

While all cloud journeys are not the same, we would like to share with you what a typical cloud journey looks like and how we can assist you in making your migration successful.

In this blog series, we will be discussing the four basic phases of your cloud migration project experience, starting with Foundations and Discovery.

Foundations and Discovery:
Understand your Ecosystem and Prepare for the Cloud

Understanding your foundations is a phase of discovery, and we need to understand just what we are migrating and how we can best accomplish the migration using a cloud-native approach. Sure, you can “lift and shift” your current applications and platforms, but that does not allow you to take full advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Oftentimes this leads to regret and an application that is much harder to support and grow within the cloud. 

During this phase, you will probably learn more about your infrastructure than you thought was possible. Documentation never covers every aspect and, let’s be honest, people forget things and others have moved on. Our goal here is to identify areas in which performance and stability are a concern, and fully understand how things interact with other applications, platforms, external services, and end-users. We also need to understand the design patterns and how that can translate to your new cloud environment. 

This is also the time we need to understand usage patterns and what resources are required to keep your applications performant and responsive. In the datacenter you need to plan for your highest traffic peak, even if it only comes once a month. In the cloud, we have the ability to scale our resources up and down, so we do not have to run full throttle all the time. Understanding this allows us to determine the best way to scale, saving you money on resource costs when you don’t need them. 

Once armed with this information, an architect will identify the best way to translate your applications and infrastructure to the cloud, leveraging community accepted cloud fundamentals and best practices specific to your cloud provider. 

During this time, we also establish governance around configuration management, monitoring and security. These are just as important as understanding your application, as these core principles are probably going to differ greatly from how you do things today in your datacenter.

How can we help you ?

  • Discovery – Discuss and whiteboard
  • Design and architect your future cloud infrastructure based on your current environment requirements
  • Project Management – We own the scope and the heartbeat, you own the outcome
  • Delivery – We maintain your project success from start to finish

 

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