Chapter 1. Optimizing Cloud Migration
Introducing the Trend: the Move to the Cloud
Cloud services are redefining how many businesses are building and hosting their applications. Flexibility, scalability, cost reduction, and reduced overheads are just some of the reasons why the case for moving to the cloud is compelling to many businesses. This is a very real trend, with a 2015 survey reporting that 72% of executives stated that the cloud was essential to their strategy, and 90% of businesses reported using the cloud in some capacity.
This move is also accompanied by a move away from server-based solutions to a world of Software as a Service-based solutions—with modern applications increasingly moving toward being jigsaw puzzles built from many different building blocks. Load balancing, file storage, databases, search, caching, authentication, data warehousing, microservices, APIs, media streaming, data processing, job queuing, and workflow are just some of the services available to build cloud-based applications. True cloud applications are fundamentally different from traditional hosted applications, not just in how they are hosted, but in the nature of how they go about solving problems to deliver resilient and flexible solutions.
The promise of the cloud, therefore, is to enable you to build a system with levels of performance and availability that wouldn’t have been available to you when building an on-premise solution (at least without an investment of time and money that ...