Thursday, January 8, 2015

(Phase Two – Strategy) Strategy to migrate Software Applications to Cloud



Series:
 (Disclaimer: The manuscript is my personal view and is not affiliated to any groups or organizations)


By this time you already are in Azure (or AWS), are comfortable around different Cloud services, and getting used to different characteristics of Cloud (such architecture/design, development, devops, test, etc.)

Did you finish post mortem of the first phase? If not then do so. It is vital not to repeat avoidable mistakes. Most of the time, post mortem highlights process related gaps.

In the second phase goal is to further the goal of Cloud strategy. All functional area of applications and enterprise need to make curate more of their actions towards Cloud:

1.      ALM tools need to make use of Cloud services.

2.      Application needs to use further use of Cloud Services.

3.      DevOps needs to further automate and code the build, and release steps

4.      Load Test can leverage Load Test service in Cloud.

5.      Enterprise IT needs to further integrate, improve policy and governance, implement SSO, etc.

In gist the application needs to become more PaaS and IT Cloud strategy is taking its shape.

Are you continuing the discovery and knowledge sharing sessions? Are you continuing the rapid PoC activities?

Did you conduct a thorough reconnaissance on how IaaS implementation is functioning? Is there any aberration?  Is your finance moved from CapEx to OpEx model? Does your team feel comfortable with new Cloud jargons, concepts, etc.? (VMs, SDNs, auto scale, Cloud Storage, ELBs, managed services (DB, queues, automation, etc.)

How much PaaS services did you make use in the previous phase? Analyze each layer of the application and find out if the depended service can be replaced with an existing PaaS or if there is a need to re-architect and recode to move towards the goal.

Did you make use of the Cloud PaaS web analytic and web app monitoring tools?

Can you contemplate about using readily available services to discover new business insights from the application and user data?

Can you move source code repository to Cloud? Analyze and find out the gaps.

Can you manage the entire project which follows an agile methodology hosted in Cloud? Analyze.

Can you move the build activity to Cloud?

Can you move Load Test to Cloud?

Can you evaluate on the strategy of the build and deployment processes viz. containerization, CMDB and CI continuous usage, etc.?

Can you not use your own personnel credential to authenticate in Cloud? Can you use corp credential?

Can you move away from IaaS to PaaS? This is the main goal of this phase from application perspective.

My intention is to share my experience around the posed above questions.

No comments:

Post a Comment