Five Principles for Deploying and Managing Linux in the Cloud

Chapter 2. Principle 1: Understand Which Linux VMs Are Adaptable to the Cloud

Running your services in the public cloud could mean lower maintenance costs, along with elasticity (the ability to quickly scale your infrastructure according to business demand), robust disaster recovery, and high-availability services. However, without thorough assessments and planning, a cloud migration effort can cost excessive time and money and can result in a paucity of required technological skills, along with security and compliance issues stemming from a lack of control over your cloud computing resources, bandwidth difficulties, and more.

In our discussion of how to migrate to the cloud, I chose not to dwell on the initial business case for a move to the cloud. I assume that a business case has been made for such a move, based on the cost, effort, potential pitfalls, long-term benefits, and the ease (or difficulty) of the migration and implementation. I focus on the technological implications of this move.

From a purely technical point of view, adopting the cloud is easier than setting up or expanding a datacenter-based computing infrastructure. However, it’s also easy to flounder in your cloud adoption effort, if you don’t educate yourself well. Often the failure to successfully adopt the cloud doesn’t just leave you where you started—you’re actually likely to lose critical time and to waste your resources, which can put you behind your competitors.

There are many half-baked truths and pitfalls ...