Cloud Migration

Before the migration it is important to specify which goals moving to the cloud helps your company to accomplish. In general, the companies seek for improving their time to market, enforcing infrastructure reliability and reducing costs on maintaining in-house systems.

Prior to migration our engineers will evaluate the existing infrastructure to see the state of your applications and services, and estimate cloud computing resources needed to comply with your company’s production requirements.

There are several strategies for migrating applications to the cloud, including:

• Lift and shift: relocating an application and its related data to a cloud platform without redesigning the app;
• Replatforming: revising your application code to some extent, so as to take advantages of your provider’s infrastructure;
• Refactoring: totally rearchitecting an application to better fit the new cloud environment; in case with monolith applications may include transferring to microservices architecture;
• Replacing: choosing to use commercial software delivered as a service (SaaS) instead of your existing application.

Depending on whether your application needs some modification or could be relocated as is, our experts suggest the migration technique that best optimizes your app to drive your business and IT goals.

Our qualified engineers will advise on cloud infrastructure types and choose the best one to improve your company’s business results. Together we shall define the list of your business-critical services and estimate the pool of resources needed for their correct operation in the cloud.

This step requires a thorough analysis and includes many different factors that need to be considered. First, it is the technical and financial expediency of preferring one provider over another and the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that they offer.

Basically, an SLA is the provider’s assurance of your application’s availability even if there is an outage on the provider’s side. For example, an SLA equaling 99.97% means that the possibility of your services being down due to the reasons attributable to the provider is 0.03%, which is as much as 2 hours and 37 minutes per year. Major cloud providers always offer a SLA no lower than 99.9%. Another key element is the offering of cloud services and their workability in regards to your business demands. For example, AWS Lambda lets you run your code in response to different events, such as data changes or HTTP requests. Running your code on a serverless platform like AWS Lambda guarantees that the business logic of your application will be accurately implemented no matter the workload, as the service scales automatically to the infinite number of instances.

Our professional cloud architects will pick out cloud services that suit best to your project needs, and have them set up and managed for you. We work with leading providers of cloud computing services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, IBM Cloud, etc.

At this stage our engineers prepare a detailed step-by-step plan that describes the process timelines, the resources to be migrated and their capacity. For example, business-critical services should be transferred during the lowest workload time (usually at night) to keep the consistency of business processes. Together we shall define the most optimal time to ensure the migration is performed with minimum downtime. In order to avoid critical errors during migration we shall prepare a scheme of interdependencies between your applications. For example, if some separate applications and services use the same database, they should be moved to the cloud as a whole, otherwise there is a risk of interrupting regular business workflow.

Before the actual migration our engineers spin up a testing infrastructure within your chosen cloud platform, enable required services and test their performance in the new environment. They also set up the CI/CD pipelines to ensure that your code is developed, built, tested and deployed faster, safer and with less bugs.

As the testing proves successful, our engineers synchronize your existing infrastructure with the new cloud environment and transfer your data to the cloud. Finally, the traffic is switched to the new platform. Migration to the cloud is always a tailored solution determined by the data to be transferred, its amount and level of criticality. No matter the complexity of your project, our experts will do their best to perform the migration seamlessly and within the agreed timescale.