Optimizing Cloud Migration

Chapter 3. Phase 2: Beginning Your Journey to the Cloud

When starting a migration to become a cloud-focused organization, there are four rules of good practice:

1. Start small and gradually migrate systems

2. Test, test, test—prove everything before committing to the move

3. Understand your performance expectations

4. Build a comprehensive monitoring solution

These rules apply equally when thinking only about Internet performance.

1. Start Small and Gradually Migrate Systems

Any rollout to the cloud should be completed as a gradual transition, moving the lower-risk or biggest-win areas first while having systems that communicate back to your on-premise solution.

Typically, legacy applications and data migration are the highest-risk areas, so the aim should be to create cloud-based services that mitigate their risks. For example, the first phase may be to create an API in the cloud that provides access to data from an on-premise database—cloud-based data caching services can be used to deliver data returned from the API. Typically, this could be targeted at a specific region to evaluate the Internet performance. You can then gradually extend that cloud-based data provision until it eventually ends up not needing to communicate back to the source database at all. It is also possible to use an A/B testing approach to roll out the new system to a small percentage of users and optimize it before rolling it out to the full user base.

Starting small minimizes the risk of the move to the ...