Series:
(Disclaimer: The manuscript is my personal view and is not
affiliated to any groups or organizations)
Prepare….prepare…and prepare more.
The current phase stresses on “lift and shift approach”….now
quite to the verbatim….why not…well that’s the whole point of Phase I
activities…
One of the challenge is to accept role changes.
Application architect, infrastructure specialists, release manager, build
engineer, system engineers, etc. all has to participate in the process
wholeheartedly. You might have learned from your preliminary analysis that
there is paradigm shift in the development and operation of software products
and services deployed in Cloud, if not then the subject is a topic for another
time J
Network designers, architects, and administrators roles are made minimal to
non-existence in this phase. Similarly data base administrators role might or
might not be needed in this phase.
The whole idea of this phase is to make minimum
amendments to the application architecture along with its ancillary processes
and tools so that the application can be run on Cloud. Thus truly you
can’t just lift and drop the application in Cloud.
The phase opens up with having access to Cloud
infrastructure for all players of software development and operation personnel.
Encouraging self-learning AND sharing
knowledge reduces considerably the ramp up time. One can expedite the process
and hasten the learning cycle with adequate upfront training. But a training
program after the team has acquainted with the Cloud products and features
makes the best effective use of the training program. As a part of this
investigation decide on the vendor and type of Cloud infrastructure that is
needed for to make the application run on Cloud. At the end of the
investigation and knowledge build activities the team has decided on a vendor,
infrastructure style (private, public, or hybrid), and the type of consumption
(Saas, PaaS, or IaaS.) I have noticed that IaaS best fits the need of
this phase. Usually a twice a week meet up to share knowledge is a good pace.
The next set of activities should be geared towards feasibility study and rapid PoC of the application and its
operation. I have noticed that there could various tracks where the goal can be
accomplished. The set of activities is quite critical as the logistic will have
a significant impact on the success of the porting project to Cloud.
The following tracks could be one way:
1.
Prepare Cloud infrastructure that adheres to
different architectural QoS --- geared towards solution architects.
2.
Adjust build scripts, modify the CI tools,
monitoring tools, etc. --- geared towards primarily system engineers (DevOps)
for operation of the application.
3.
Amend the application architect --- geared
towards application architect
4.
Contemplate about the storage – geared towards
DBA.
To extract the best benefits out in the activities is to congregate
frequently and demonstrate “how” – technical walkthrough of their
findings to the team. Thrice a week meet up should be a good balance between
research time and the share time. Besides the team also works incessantly
towards maintaining the application in the current environment, in other words
the team is not ideal and available 100% to work on the migration project J
Security of application and data is paramount to any
company. Data at rest and data in motion should handle security. For instance
data in rest could use AES 256 for encryption and data in motion should use
TLS.
Bottom line of the first phase is accepting the fact that doing
business (designing, developing, and operating applications) in Cloud entails a
different thinking than traditional way of doing so.
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