Migrating from on-premise to the cloud, or from cloud to cloud, is not just a technical undertaking nowadays. Often it requires extensive thinking, planning and visioning since it will determine your way of working for the years to come. At LINKIT we know a thing or two about migrating to the cloud. Having done such transitions for major companies like KLM, IBM and multiple governments. These are our top 5 tips when migrating to the cloud.
1. Plan for cloud-native apps, not just lift-and-shift.
It is tempting to span virtual machines in the cloud and merely copy your on-premises infrastructure in the cloud. By doing this, you do not benefit entirely from public cloud infrastructure and its amazing services. As a result, you will mainly pay more for colocation in the cloud…
2. Do not lean entirely on “learn by doing”.
You may have great engineers, smart and fast-learners. However, public cloud exists for more than a decade, and if you don’t have very experienced cloud engineers, reach out to freelancers or companies that can help you with it.
3. Public cloud web consoles are great to explore but always use infra-as-code tools.
You may want to try a new service and go straight to the console, but whenever you feel like it will ramp up, switch to infra-as-code tools. Use terraform, ARM, CloudFormation, or whatever you want, but stay away from the console when doing important things.
4. Stop and think about your architecture, especially networking.
It is quite straightforward to start spanning VM’s, services, buckets, and all on a public cloud. Then you have to connect later, you find out something is missing and you add an API gateway here and there. When you try to look from a birds-eye-view, you notice that you have built a Frankenstein. Being agile doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan it… so stop to think and consider the best practices around and what your business wants from it.
5. Kubernetes is not the holy grail nor the goal.
You may be tempted to use Kubernetes-as-a-service from the public cloud providers because everybody is talking about it. It is a potent tool with lots of usages, but it is also complex and has a lot of moving parts. Try to solve your company problems, not use a tool just because your engineers want to.
Do you want to know more about the do’s and don’ts of a cloud migration? Then contact our experts! Curious about an example from practice? Then readĀ this business caseĀ about performing a cloud migration at the CHDR research institute or read ourĀ cloud checklistĀ for insight into the next steps of your migration process.
