1. Lift and Shift
The Lift and Shift cloud migration technique includes migrating an existing application to a modern cloud platform as is, with very little modification to the architecture of the application. Because the architecture of the existing application was likely architected for its original host, the application might fail to take advantage of the features and benefits of the new cloud platform.
Benefits
- Minimal development work ($)
Drawbacks
- Performance concerns
- Reliability concerns
- Missing the benefits of elastic cloud resources
- Higher cost of management over time
2. Hybrid Partitioning
Hybrid partitioning includes partitioning the individual components of an application and spanning them across a combination of both private infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure. The idea is to limit the amount of dSimplify the Cloud with Cloud-A & Cloud 66 Webinarevelopment work required, by migrating the highly scalable, highly transactional components of an application to public cloud resources to take advantage of the elasticity and utility billing, but keeping the less scalable components (think Oracle databases) on their original host.
Benefits
- Best of both worlds (public and private cloud)
- Components on the Public cloud resources can scale up and down on demand
- Less development work than than totally refactoring an app
Drawbacks
- More development and testing work than Lift and Shift ($$)
- Possible latency concerns
- Not a fit for every application
3. Refactor
Refactoring an application includes a complete rewrite of the code, so that the application becomes “cloud aware” and can take advantage of the benefits of elastic, scalable, API driven public cloud infrastructure. Since this strategy is essentially going back to the drawing board, the app can be re-written with modern application architecture best practices like decoupling components and utilizing distributed microservices for enhanced reliability and performance.
Benefits
- Scale resources on demand
- Costs scale with demand
- Increased application resiliency
- Increased performance
Drawbacks
- Requires the most development and testing work ($$$)
More Information
For more information on cloud migrations and other considerations for public cloud adoption, check out our whitepaper titled: Public Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise.
This whitepaper outlines
- Best practices for faster time to value
- Keys to developer adoption
- Application considerations
- Handling internal politics
- Budgetary considerations
- Achieving executive buy-in