Lift and shift on-premise to cloud

Hello Readers

First, let me introduce myself, my name is Juzer Bhopalwala and in my professional network I am known as Jimmy.

I have 14+ years of experience in Information technology and have worked in number of tech giant companies as a programmer, architect and security analyst.

After 8 years of service, me, and my friend Tanuj Roy started our own organization GENX Technology Services, and we met a crazy, but genius person called Charles Wright in a freelancer site.

From there evolved a dream of making a software that automates workload (server) migration from anywhere (physical, virtual) to almost all the known and some less known cloud platforms. The dream was materialized into a very well-known cloud migration company called ATADATA which eventually got acquired by Deloitte Consulting.

So, this was about me and my journey, now let us talk about cloud.

Till now in the industry people are not aware what cloud computing actually is. In simple terms cloud computing only obfuscates the hardware and software that runs the workloads or application and only provide a gateway in terms of API or IP address to access those resources.

Most of the cloud instances run on popular hypervisors such as Citrix Xen, VMWare ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V. So, whenever you provision an instance in cloud through their portal or API, an instance is created in these hypervisors and you get the IP address or the hostname to access them.

The reason I am talking about hypervisors here is because each of them support a different set of storage and network controller so while migrating your instance to cloud you need to be very well aware of the underlying controller otherwise the instance will never boot in that cloud environment or even if it boots up might not get network and you will never be able to connect to it.

Then comes the cloud related software’s that needs to be installed on the instance after it has reached the cloud premise, those can be downloaded from the cloud portal itself.

Since I am not tutoring how to develop a software to automate migrations, I am not in liberty to get much deeper on this, rather this article is more from a perspective of people who will be running these software’s to move the workloads.

Before you execute your migration to cloud, the most important thing is the assessment of your on-premises environment. You will need to have inventory of all your resources and how each of them is connected to one another so that moving to cloud your resource network topology does not break. This concept is called "Move Groups".

After the assessment is done you need start your migration using the tool of your choice.

Migrating a live server is not as easy as it sounds, there will be a lot of bottlenecks in the process. The first thing you need is proper planning which is a common cloud migration challenge. Many cloud migration projects go awry because of the wrong approach. This is where your existing blue printing comes into picture, at this stage you decide what infrastructure you want to migrate, which one to decommission and which one to recreate using the latest tools available in cloud.

The next thing you need a good connectivity between your source datacenter and your cloud provider. In most cases a VPN (Virtual Private Network) will be used. So whatever migration tool you chose should have the capability of resuming the data transfer if the data transfer is stuck because of network hiccups, this happens many times and I can vouch for it with my experience of migrating more than 5000 servers to various cloud platforms.

The adaptation of cloud infrastructure should be taken care by your migration tool if you are using one and it should automatically to all the post migration activities, this is the most challenging part for the developer/architect of any cloud migration tool.

There will always be chances where the server does not boot in cloud or it might not get network. Well at that point you really need infrastructure experts to perform their magic.

In my next article I will be covering the challenges and the solution to the activities which are done post migration and in cutover phase.

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