Migrating Applications to the Cloud

Introduction

Imagine a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people radically increase their consumption of different kinds of goods, products, and services. Demand at this scale is the IT equivalent of an extinction event: customer-facing systems—websites, mobile apps, and call centers—are overwhelmed, as are the core IT systems and packaged applications that power their sales and marketing, inventory management, supply chain management, and procurement processes, just to name a few. If these systems are overwhelmed, so, too, are the database, application server, and other middleware systems that they depend on, along with the custom apps that knit together their business processes.

It is a recipe for disruption, downtime, and customer dissatisfaction all the way down.

The pandemic exposed the essentially reactive posture of on-premises infrastructure; reactive in the sense that on-premises infrastructure, unlike cloud infrastructure, was not designed with elasticity and resiliency foremost in mind. It provided a fresh demonstration, if one were needed, of the inherent limitations of this legacy infrastructure model. It exposed the fact that conventional IT infrastructure lacks the practically limitless capacity of the public cloud, the pervasive automation that is characteristic of that environment, the abstraction afforded by the software-defined virtualization of resources, and, not least, the flexibility and adaptability permitted by the pooling and sharing of virtualized ...