The idea of relying onto Lift & Shift-approaches when considering the move into cloud environments is simple. And it is plain wrong and (financially) risky. And it will most likely be a disappointment in regard to scaling, availability and performance. Instead, one must think completely different of Cloud to actually gain an advantage. Let me explain and let me show you the pillars required for a successful cloud experience.
Cloud is often understood as a way of thinking of an infrastructure: automated, operated by a cloud provider, easy to set up. While this is true and while it could definitely be the right decision to move to public or private cloud providers, it gives the wrong impression: if you move into a cloud environment only by executing Lift & Shift approaches, you might perhaps save some money on the infrastructural side and perhaps some time on the provisioning side – but you simply exchange one datacenter operator (yourself or your current one) by another, very generic, one (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, etc.).
In fact, quite often you do not even save money, since the overwhelming number of offerings and the reduced amount of customization can cause lacks of transparency and might even lead to higher operational costs, as the cloud environments are typically operated on an infrastructural level only, leaving management and operations in your hands.
If you only execute a Lift & Shift approach, your software and middle-ware will not substantially benefit from what cloud actually has to offer: automated scaling, fail-over-functionalities, zero-downtime deployments, and so on. You might mimic these functionalities by bringing in more infrastructure – but at which costs?
Or you would use proprietary offerings from these cloud providers. Which will tie you to them and trap you inside their ecosystem. This kind of vendor lock-in is to be considered a major risk for any enterprise and project and should therefore be avoided. So, there must be a better way.
CONTENT
- Lift & Shift into a cloud environment
- #1: CloudNative. By Design.
- #2: CloudNative. By Approach.
- Automation and Versioning
- Agile Teams, DevOps and Iteration
- #3: CloudNative. By mindset.
- #4: New Work
- #5: Knowledge Management
- The sum of things: CloudExcellence
