With time, the cloud has become the essence of the IT infrastructure for every organization. Moreover, the technical executives these days have their entire focus on upgrading their key enterprise applications to the cloud while making way for the business goals.
In fact, the use of servers and computers has enabled businesses to attain the highest level of performance benchmarks. And the modern business environment that has some crucial requirements to streamline resources has found the cloud as the path to futuristic outcomes.
Nevertheless, most business institutions right now are heading on to a race for taking mission-critical applications to the cloud, and the rush to lean on futuristic solutions has increased the prominence of certain mistakes. Though the idea of cloud migration has enabled the best use of hardware and software resources to attain scalability goals, there is still a huge scope for nurturing efficient resource utilization.
Since cloud technologies have all the potential to increase business operations while diminishing any chances of downtime, enjoying seamless scalability with your cloud migration objectives needs to align well with certain best practices. With years of experience handling cloud testing services, here we bring you the list of 10 key elements that make it to successful cloud migration.
Let’s begin.
Deciding The Migration Architect
Cloud migration is a highly strategic process, and therefore it needs extensive focus on planning the migration architecture. This usually involves defining the path to data migration, the solution requirements, benchmarking priorities, and any refactoring requirements that can help in a successful migration.
In other words, the cloud migration process begins with technical decision-making and planning on the project. Besides, migration architecture allows working on the project-critical responsibilities such as cloud software testing that must be worked to ensure the success of the project.
Cloud Integration Level
Any cloud migration project that demands migration of on-premise data center to the cloud needs some integration. However, the integration could be fostered in two ways which can either be shallow integration or deep cloud integration.
The shallow cloud integration is more of a lift and shift process where you only need to shift your on-prem application to the cloud without any need for server changes to make a suitable environment for running the application. This means the application is lifted, moved, and shifted to the cloud as it is.
On the other hand, deep cloud integration is meant to offer additional cloud capabilities to the application. It can be auto-scaling, dynamic load balancing, or implementing serverless computing capabilities to the application while defining cloud-specific data stores such as Amazon S3 or Dynamo DB.
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Single Cloud or Multi-Cloud Selection
Cloud migration is a highly technical process that needs business leaders to make so many choices. One such choice needs to be made with selection between single and multi-cloud platforms. At times, the migration only needs a single cloud environment to work optimally, while there are applications that need a multi-cloud environment to prevent any disruption.
Also, single cloud integrations are easy as they only need your technical team to focus on a single set of cloud APIs. However, working on a single vendor solution often involves downtime as any situation like server issues or closing of vendor brand would make you compromise a lot with your operations. On the contrary, using a multi-cloud approach could help you avoid all such issues but may need you to spend a little extra on the entire development, deployment, and maintenance process.
Besides, it needs you to have a careful selection between different multi-cloud models when you need to yield the best possible outcomes within the defined budget. For instance, you can choose to run:
- One application in one cloud and other applications on a different cloud.
- Run single application on multiple cloud servers.
- Building a cloud-agnostic application which means building applications that can run on any cloud server.
However, each of these models has its own limitations and benefits, which must be understood well before any migration process is initiated. Also, you can run some usability tests and user acceptance testing within your team to find out what model can best serve your needs.
Define Cloud KPIs
Once you are done planning and making the initial moves with your cloud migration strategy, you can start with the planning of KPIs. In most cases, KPIs surrounding the application and the service are defined, while it is necessary that any KPIs that can improve the cloud migration and post-migration service should be considered.
Some of the few important categories that you need to keep in account on your way to defining KPIs include user experience, performance, infrastructure, and business engagement. These metrics may further follow page load time, response time, throughput, CPU usage, memory usage, conversions, engagement rate, etc.
All in all, it is essential that you must know all the metrics that can cause a maximum impact on your cloud migration model.
Create Performance Baselines
Creating a performance baseline is about measuring the performance of your application to reach the acceptable criteria. Baseline also helps you validate the improvements made after the migration while giving insights on any problems that you may encounter during or after the launch.
Nevertheless, it is crucial that the baseline metric must be decided well in time so that the application data can be collected for a defined duration. Most of the time, the technical teams and even the cloud testing services recommend collecting data for a longer period as a larger amount of information can help with better representation.
Above all, it is crucial that your data collection model for baselining must be focused on collecting the right type of data that can aid your business and operations with respect to industry standards.
Set Migration Component Priority
Another key element that you need to keep in mind on your way to cloud migration is to decide on the priority components. The process might need you to identify the connections between the services and the components using a performance monitoring tool. Besides, you can create an application dependency map to determine which components are most significant on your way to cloud migration.
Such wise actions help you to understand that if you need to migrate the whole application in one go or there are certain internal services that must be migrated on priority to keep the operations flowing. The approach also helps you to resist any impact that your customers have to bear while your team is working on the cloud migration process.
Application Refactoring
Before your application is taken to the cloud, it is vital that you must have a quick tour of your application to identify any possible areas that need refactoring. Some of the most significant checks that you may need to make on your way to refactoring include:
- To check that application should run well on varying cloud instances that might need dynamic scaling.
- To improve any resource utilization capabilities
- To craft a service-oriented architecture for taking all your services individually and more quickly to the cloud.
Strategize Data-Migration
From planning to refactoring, every stage of cloud migration is easy until you need to work on data migration. Since the data access methods are dependent on the on-prem model, moving data to the cloud could affect the performance. The situation could be equally tricky when you have data on an on-prem server, and the data needs to be fetched in the cloud.
However, you can involve a cloud testing company to keep a check on the system while you choose between bi-directional syncing, one-way synchronization, or use a cloud migration service like AWS to meet your data migration goals.
More importantly, the planning of data migration when taking your application to the cloud should be worked with precision while taking insights to the cloud migration architect as it is the only way to resist any failure of expectations.
Making A Switch To Production
Once you are done working on the data migration process, the next big hassle that you need to encounter is planning to switch over the production from on-prem to cloud. This needs measuring of the architecture and complexity of the application model while keeping a watch on data.
It can be done in two easy ways:
- One is to make a quick switch from on-prem to cloud, validate the system and switch traffic from on-prem to cloud.
- The second way works by moving a few customers to the cloud from on-prem in different windows of time until all the traffic is moved to the cloud.
Application Resource Allocation Review
The last stage of migrating your on-prem solution to the cloud is resource optimization, as the best thing about taking your operations to the cloud is to enjoy dynamic resource allocation.
The process might need you to reach your team for creating resource distribution plans and scale your application and resources as per the requirements. Either it is adding more resources to the application or reducing the complexity of the architecture, dynamic scaling on the cloud can be used at the maximum to ensure hassle-free experiences.
How Could Quality Assurance Help With Cloud Migration Goals?
When it comes to cloud migration, the process involves sending applications and data to the cloud from an on-prem data center. On top of that, the process involves an extensive shift in the infrastructure configurations in order to align the existing technology with a new environment. All this process involves the use of cloud hosting services like AWS or Microsoft Azure that can help to foster the IaaS, Paas, or SaaS models.
Here comes the role of cloud testing services. A cloud testing service provider on your way to cloud migration could help you with Pre-migration advisory, Assurance during migration, and validation of the system after the migration is achieved. Also, cloud assurance could help you guide throughout the migration route to handle any unexpected challenges that you might face with the structural efforts.
Moreover, when you hire testers for cloud testing, the existing decision to migrate to the cloud becomes easier as they have all the knowledge required to lead your cloud initiatives for improved business performance.
In a nutshell, having a robust cloud quality assurance plan in place is vital when you need to harness all the operational benefits that you need to yield with taking your existing operating system or software to the cloud.
All the best!
Need help with your cloud migration project? Is it an application you need to migrate from on-prem to cloud without losing its functionalities? Or do you need a helping hand to manage all your cloud solutions for quality benchmarks?
We at BugRaptors bring you all the experience necessary to drive your cloud testing goals.
For more information, reach our team through info@bugraptors.com
