First steps into the cloud and continuous delivery

For businesses transitioning to the cloud, migrating existing applications to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform via a “lift-and-shift” approach is a common first step. Establishing an automated continuous delivery pipeline is a key practice during this transition period, to ensure that the processes for delivering applications to cloud platforms are fast and reliable, and go hand-in-hand with implementing an Agile methodology and breaking up organizational silos.

This lesson examines challenges identified by respondents to the Cloud Platform Survey that businesses face as they take their first steps into the cloud. It also describes key best practices and enabling tools for continuous integration and delivery, automation, and monitoring.

Lift-and-Shift

The lift-and-shift cloud migration model involves replicating existing applications to run on a public or private cloud platform, without redesigning them. The underlying infrastructure is moved to run on virtual servers in the cloud; however, the application uses the same technology stack as before and thus is not able to take full advantage of cloud platform features and services. As a result, applications migrated following the lift-and-shift approach typically make less efficient use of cloud computing resources than cloud-native applications. In addition, they might not be as scalable or cost effective to operate in the cloud as you would like. However, lift-and-shift ...