EDITOR’S NOTE KEY CONSIDERATIONS FOR APP MIGRATION

REDUCING COSTS IS POSSIBLE, BUT NOT GUARANTEED

MIGRATION TOOLS CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

Which Apps Will Soar in the Cloud?Migrating an application from an on-premises facility to a cloud provider means choosing carefully. Certain apps will be more suitable than others, and some will show a much quicker return on investment.

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Successfully Migrating Apps to the Cloud

Running an application in the cloud promises improved flexibility and a more effi-cient use of IT dollars. And the cloud delivers on that—right?

This handbook explores this question, delv-ing into the evaluation of an application’s suit-ability for migration to the cloud, the financial aspects, and the tools that can make the pro-cess less risky and more rewarding.

Cloud expert Ofir Nachmani writes about the process for evaluating an on-premises app. Can it simply be rehosted in the cloud? Can it be migrated if rebuilt? Should it be replaced? These are some of the key considerations IT planners need to work through, Nachmani says, to make sound decisions about which apps will thrive in the cloud.

He also offers guidance on how to pru-dently proceed. An organization will want to have proof of concept before committing an app to the cloud, as well as an understanding

of everything from load balancing to secu-rity configurations to a provider’s third-party ecosystem.

Also in this handbook, SearchCloudCom-puting’s Kristin Knapp writes about issues surrounding total cost of ownership for apps. Certain business apps, such as those prone to bursts in use at particular times, are almost sure to generate quicker and bigger returns on investment than others, she explains.

Knapp also examines some of the tools and services available to help a business make the most of its cloud endeavors. Being vigilant about post-migration app management, she notes, will go a long way toward making sure the effort was worth it. n

Phil SweeneySenior Managing Editor

Data Center and Virtualization GroupTechTarget

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Key Considerations for App Migration

Cloud migration is not about moving a single VM from your on-premises data center, but about relocating an important, working service. Organizations, especially the more tra-ditional ones, have begun to recognize the value of the cloud, including its cost efficiency and flexibility. There’s a lot involved in migrating an application to the cloud, and there will be challenges encountered along the way.

Let’s consider a purpose-built, mission-critical application. Years of investment have gone into the creation of this IT asset sitting in a vertically integrated data center with custom network, storage and compute. Building and running an environment requires investments in hardware and hundreds of hours of staff time. To migrate to the cloud, methods must be found for translating these on-premises IT resources to virtual software layers.

There are certain cases in which you can’t lift and shift (i.e., rehost) an application. Your

Oracle ERP system, for one, can’t simply be dropped as is into your new Amazon cloud account. High-performance compute that sup-ports heavy workloads, such as credit card fraud analysis, would be another complicated migration case.

These legacy workloads traditionally run on supercomputers and are not built to scale hori-zontally on top of a commodity infrastructure. In addition, traditional businesses in industries such as financial services and healthcare still have mainframe systems that hold core parts of their businesses. These applications have criti-cal legacy dependencies and must adhere to strict compliance standards.

Migration of these entrenched apps to the cloud is challenged by moving custom hard-ware, legacy system dependencies (such as workloads that need access to an aging data-base) and a complex network footprint to an entirely different IT environment.

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THE ASSESSMENT STAGE

The paths for migrating an application to the cloud are fairly well established. A Gartner anal-ysis identified five primary methods for this:

■n Rehost: Redeploy applications on infra-structure as a service (IaaS) without making changes.

■n Refactor: Run applications on platform as a service (PaaS).

■n Revise: Modify or extend existing code to fit the cloud environment.

■n Rebuild: Rebuild a PaaS environment.■n Replace: Discard existing applications and instead implement them as software as a ser-vice (SaaS).

These methods provide a general explana-tion for dealing with migration to the cloud in all its different forms (i.e., IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), including the option to replace your current traditional CRM with an online SaaS product such as Salesforce.

To make an informed decision regarding what to move, you should first assess the target workload requirements, such as service-level

agreements, performance and compliance.In addition, you have to run a pilot/proof

of concept project and test performance and security on the potential cloud. Your migration pilot will help you learn the skills and capacity (number of VMs, storage types and size, and network bandwidth) your application requires. You’ll also become aware of any limitations involving your cloud vendor. Learn about the cost of the cloud resources/services required, the security controls that should replace your legacy appliances (e.g. firewalls) and the stor-age services that will replace your various traditional repositories (for example, Amazon cloud’s Elastic File System to replace your tra-ditional network-attached storage).

You shouldn’t start with your tightly coupled applications. Instead, go with your standalone applications, and make sure you have a plan. For example, when taking even a simple Drupal website to Amazon’s cloud, it is important to know exactly what’s required. You may need to switch from your load balancer to AWS Elastic Load Balancing, or move media files from your block storage volume to Amazon’s Simple Stor-age Service.

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STRATEGIES AND TOOLS TO MAKE IT WORK

When migrating more critical workloads, take a phased approach. That way, if a phase fails, you can bring those services back to the on-prem-ises environment for fixing and redesigning before trying again. To remove risks, be sure to have the right tools available to provide con-trol and transparency over your cloud inven-tory. These will provide insight into usage, costs and security configurations. AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor can be use-ful for these tasks, and a third-party product from Cloudyn, Dome9 and others could prove beneficial.

Another important aspect is data migration. This requires consideration of the amount of data involved and its synchronization with your on-premises data repositories. At this stage, an IT team needs to plan the one-time move of the data on “production day” as well as the streamlining of data between the different environments as required.

A cloud vendor will offer services for sup-porting data migration in a reasonable time (considering the amount of data you need to transfer). To support the data synchronization,

you’ll need to identify which tools will be implemented.

Every cloud service provider has its third-party ecosystem of tools and services. In most cases, these can close any feature and function-ality gaps. For example, with Amazon’s cloud, AWS-certified partners can provide intrusion prevention and detection technologies, which are capabilities that AWS itself does not sup-port. Another example is with the Heroku development platform. Heroku’s Elements Marketplace provides add-ons that help con-nect and scale with multiple types of databases.

Moving applications to the cloud can be challenging, and, when not undertaken effec-tively, can result in the same risks of any costly, traditional IT project. To lessen the chance of something going awry, develop a clear under-standing of your application and network architecture. Then run a pilot to see what’s actually real.

When done properly, migrating applications to the cloud allows a business to take advan-tage of what cloud computing offers—without compromising service continuity, robustness or security. —Ofir Nachmani

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Reducing Costs is Possible, but not Guaranteed

Greater flexibility, agility and scale often top the many reasons companies move applications to the cloud. Even so, reduc-ing total cost of ownership and management expenses is almost always the end goal.

Most organizations assume the bulk of their total cost of ownership (TCO) savings will come from the reduced hardware costs resulting from a move to the cloud. But many overlook the significant value—and finan-cial gain—in cloud automation, said Robert Mahowald, program vice president for software as a service (SaaS) and cloud software at IDC.

When an organization migrates an app to the cloud, it frees up the precious IT resources and staff that managed it. “There is a cost swap out, and then the retirement of the physical assets, but then there’s [the benefit of] doing less and having more automation so you can put fewer people on that job,” Mahowald said. “That’s important.”

That scenario played out for Novitex Enter-prise Solutions, which provides cloud-based document outsourcing services. In 2013, the Stamford, Conn., company started to migrate some of its document lifecycle management applications to IBM SoftLayer. As a result, the overall TCO for those applications has shrunk significantly, said Novitex CIO Vanessa Lapins.

“It’s hard for me to quantify if it’s five heads or 50 heads, but I definitely know I would need a lot more resources and a lot more boots on the ground [if not for the move to the cloud],” Lapins said.

“Now, we can focus on strategy. We can focus on client solutions. That’s where we can put our mindshare,” she said. “The total cost of ownership overall is much lower.”

While the cost savings from cloud can be significant, it’s important to remember that not all business apps are created equal. And not all will reap the same financial benefit from cloud.

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FINDING THE BEST RETURN

Before migrating applications to the cloud, categorize them into one of three groups: ideal for cloud, a potential candidate for cloud, and those that should remain on-premises, says David Hoff, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Sherpas, a cloud advisory and services provider based in Atlanta.

Those applications that are ideal for cloud tend to see the greatest financial return from a cloud migration. They also typically generate that return more quickly than the apps in the other two groups, Hoff said.

So, what distinguishes these cloud-friendly apps from the rest? For starters, Hoff explained, they’re “bursty,” meaning they experience irregular spikes in demand. E-commerce apps, for example, will see a burst of activity around the holidays. Even simpler, internal applica-tions, such as those hosting corporate meeting minutes, experience bursts in demand for short periods of time.

These applications reap the greatest benefit from cloud features such as autoscaling, where compute resources are automatically spun up or down, depending on usage.

“It’s an amazing use of cloud resources, because you are getting the capability to handle that huge request, but you aren’t paying a pen-alty for the other 364 days of the year it’s sit-ting idle,” Hoff said.

Bursty applications also include those sup-porting digital ad campaigns and those used for big data and high-performance comput-ing, said Kris Bliesner, co-founder and CTO of 2nd Watch, a cloud consultancy in Liberty Lake, Wash. “Where the need for computing resources is high, but only during a certain period of time—those are fantastic workloads for getting great, great ROI,” Bliesner said.

2nd Watch clients tend to see cost savings on the low end (between 30% and 40%) after moving those workloads to AWS, which is a 2nd Watch partner, Bliesner said. Clients see

What distinguishes cloud-friendly apps from the rest? For starters, they’re “bursty,” meaning they experience irregular spikes in demand.

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cost savings from cloud as soon as the first month, especially if the move eliminates the need for a major capital expense. For others, savings are accumulated more slowly, over the course of three to five years.

Like bursty applications, mobile applications usually run more cost-efficiently in the cloud, Hoff said. In addition to experiencing inconsis-tent spikes in traffic, mobile applications can benefit immensely from the global data cen-ter footprint of a cloud provider like AWS or Google. All those data centers, Hoff said, allow mobile applications to scale more quickly, while maintaining high performance for users around the globe.

While bursty and mobile applications see significant gains from cloud, not all applica-tions will. Both Bliesner and Hoff noted that

applications tied tightly to legacy hardware, such as earlier versions of an Oracle database, might not be good candidates for cloud. In fact, moving that application to the cloud could add costs rather than reduce them, especially if the hardware running that app is already paid for.

“Porting a workload and getting it into the cloud is not trivial, because of all the depen-dencies,” Hoff said. “And if you can’t prove a return in advance, it’s probably something that should stay where it is.”

Hoff noted that cloud migration costs for a simple, standalone app can be under $1,000, but can easily exceed 10X to 20X that amount for more complex applications. Automation, scale and complexity all influence these costs, he said.

COSTS CAN HIDE IN THE CLOUD

While moving applications to the cloud is generally cost-effective, it can also introduce hidden, or at least unexpected, costs. Those related to bandwidth and cloud management are most common, Bliesner said.

Novitex’s Lapins urged other organizations

Applications tied tightly to legacy hardware, such as earlier versions of an Oracle database, might not be good candidates for cloud migration.

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to be especially cognizant of the extra network bandwidth needed to move data in and out of the cloud.

“Definitely have an investment in the net-work,” Lapins said. “It’s really critical. We did a lot of pre-planning and took it as an opportu-nity to revisit really almost all of our data lines to be able to get the best price.”

Luckily, there are tools that can help man-age and track cloud costs. AWS, for instance,

provides its own cloud billing and cost report-ing service.

2nd Watch and other third-party providers offer tools for keeping tabs on cloud usage and expenditures.

“We continue to spend a lot of time with our customers, helping them understand how the business model and the consumption model are different in the cloud,” Bliesner said.

—Kristin Knapp

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Migration Tools Can Make all the Difference

Hoping to reap benefits such as greater flexibility, cost-efficiency and scale, organiza-tions of all sizes are migrating applications to the cloud—but many times, they can’t go at it alone.

Fortunately, there are a range of cloud pro-vider and third-party tools designed to help organizations migrate applications to the cloud, and then manage and optimize those apps post-migration. In some cases, these tools also help organizations track their cloud computing resources, costs and performance.

For many IT professionals, cloud migration tools are a saving grace—and it seems more organizations are choosing to adopt them. According to research group IDC, the world-wide cloud systems management software mar-ket is expected to exceed $8 billion by 2019. Tools for cloud performance and event man-agement, including those that provide moni-toring and resource optimization capabilities,

represent the fastest-growing segment of that market.

When it comes to choosing a cloud migration tool, organizations should step back and con-sider their unique IT and application require-ments. For instance, AutoGrid, a provider of big data analytics software for energy and utility companies based in Redwood Shores, Calif., opted for Cloudyn, a software as a ser-vice (SaaS) offering that allows users to man-age and monitor cloud workloads and costs across a number of different cloud platforms, ranging from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to OpenStack.

As AutoGrid’s customer base continued to grow, so did its AWS cloud environment, which it uses to host its big data software. The com-pany wanted a cloud optimization tool that could help track its AWS costs and identify cloud sprawl.

“One of the reasons we use Cloudyn ... is that

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it keeps our sprawl in check,” said Tim Fewkes, head of product operations at AutoGrid. “We needed something to keep us accountable.”

Other organizations look for a different set of capabilities in a cloud migration tool. For example, ScaleArc, a provider of database traf-fic management software based in Santa Clara, Calif., chose CloudVelox for its automated cloud disaster recovery (DR) capabilities.

Among other use cases, ScaleArc uses CloudVelox DR to back up its bug tracking and ticketing system, said Bobby Brown, VP of operations at ScaleArc.

“If we know it will be more than 10 to 15

minutes of downtime, we will spin it up in AWS using CloudVelox so engineers aren’t down and customers can still submit a ticket,” Brown said.

Doug Lionberger, former director of e-com-merce, cloud services and DevOps at Hyatt, said he used CloudVelox to accelerate the migration of the Hyatt.com website to the cloud. And while the tool’s ability to reduce the timeline for that project was essential, so was the simplicity with which his team could use it, Lionberger said.

“The UI was very intuitive and effortless to use,” he added. —Kristin Knapp

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

KRISTIN KNAPP is site editor for SearchCloudComputing. Contact her at kknapp@techtarget.com or follow her on Twitter: @kknapp86.

OFIR NACHMANI is a business technology advisor, blogger and lecturer with extensive experience in business tech-nology. His IamOnDemand.com blog is the go-to guide for modern technology startups and cloud developers.

Which Apps Will Soar in the Cloud? is a SearchCloudComputing e-publication.

Margie Semilof | Editorial Director

Phil Sweeney | Senior Managing Editor

Dan Cagen | Associate Features Editor

Linda Koury | Director of Online Design

Rebecca Kitchens | Publisher rkitchens@techtarget.com

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