Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

During the public cloud migration, the IT team needs to take a step-by-step approach to avoid a terrible "system shutdown" event.

As many enterprises migrate to a cloud-based infrastructure, IT teams need to ensure availability during the migration process. However, given the complexity involved, it is not easy to prevent or minimize downtime during cloud migration. Cloud teams need to consider data inconsistencies, monitor different software versions, and check that their network connections are successful.

If an enterprise's applications are disabled, their business will be disrupted. Although the exact metrics vary by company and application, Gartner found in 2014 that the average cost of a network downtime was $5600 per minute. The high cost of downtime events is also one of the reasons why companies often migrate their most responsible workloads to other platforms, including the cloud.

Enterprise users are still expanding the scope of public cloud applications at a relatively rapid rate. Forrester Research predicts that the global public cloud market will reach $146 billion in 2017, up from $87 billion in 2015.

An obscure prospect

For companies that choose to migrate to the cloud, the outlook for the future is mixed. Any cloud migration process is difficult. Moving information requires a lot of time and effort, even if the production system is completely compatible with the target system. It is highly unlikely that your cloud provider is running the same system as your internal users, so the challenge of cloud migration increases exponentially.

On the other hand, today's computing infrastructure is more modular than ever before.

"Virtualization makes it easier for enterprises to migrate workloads between different systems," said Lauren E. Nelson, chief analyst and head of infrastructure as a service private cloud at Forrester Research.

Virtualization creates a layer of abstraction, so software is no longer as dependent on system features as it used to be. Applications are no longer closely linked to the operating system and tend to rely more on which server resources are available. The disadvantage is that modern workloads are usually large and complex. The implementation of most functions requires hundreds of millions of lines of code. In addition, their modular design means that they can interact with many other systems, such as those used for identity management.

Where to start the cloud migration process

It is not feasible to migrate all users' applications and supporting infrastructure to the public cloud at once.

"if there are a large number of applications, the migration process can take six to eighteen months," Nelson said.

Break down the entire cloud migration process into manageable steps. Start with the smallest and simplest projects, and then the larger and more complex ones. During the migration process, run the internal deployment and cloud computing systems in parallel, synchronize data, and test the cloud deployment to ensure that there are no omissions during the migration. In addition, record all API to understand which API users need to monitor during cloud migration.

When enterprise users map their original interfaces to new interfaces, the key to success lies in the details. For example, an application may run version 4.0 of the user interface, while a cloud provider may use version 4.1, which may include a feature that the application does not support and prevent crashes while the system is running.

Customization, the network faces the challenge of migration

During cloud migration, custom applications that distinguish between enterprise services or simplify operations pose additional challenges. When an enterprise rewrites an application, it usually creates an add-on or rewrite software. This customization can cause problems if the cloud provider lacks the software needed to support unique features.

Network communication is another important factor associated with the public cloud. When enterprise users move information from internal to off-site, they need to ensure that their WAN links are transferred fast enough to provide sufficient performance. In some cases, this requires an upgrade.

Enterprises face many challenges when migrating workloads to the cloud, but public cloud providers provide tools and services to simplify the cloud migration process.

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