The pointy end of Cloud migrations

Last week I started forging with the aim of making knives. Strange, I know, but to me there is a lot of similarities to knife making and migrating IT systems to the Cloud.

Firstly, you need a plan. Weather you are moving servers, or making a knife, you need to have a clear idea what you want in the end. Are you making a hunting knife, or a pocket knife? Are you just going to migrate your servers to IaaS, or are you going to make full use of the Cloud and go to PaaS? Whatever one you pick the path forward is vastly different.

The next issue is talent. Regardless of the way you pick, you will need to ensure you have a team that can cover the whole process. Just as you need metal and woodworking skills to fully understand how to make a knife, you need to know everything about the system you are moving to, as well as the systems you are migrating. Do you have enough talent that knows the Cloud environment you have chosen? Does your team have the networking, database, operating system, and programming skills you are going to need to migrate everything?

And then implementation creates additional issues. With knives, you can do the hard work of forging the metal, or you can just reshape a piece of metal into a knife. With Cloud systems you have a similar choice. Do you use a tool like Azure Site Recovery (ASR), which migrates the whole server for you, or are you going to do a parallel install, and create new machines, and take this opportunity to update everything? And if you are planning on going full PaaS, do you migrate the servers to IaaS first, or go straight to PaaS, and how are you planning on migrating any services which can’t be migrated to full PaaS?

With knifemaking, there is one last thing that people do not really think of, and that is storing the knife safely when not in use. This normally requires a leather sheath and is yet another skill that is required. Security in the Cloud is an important skill that shouldn’t be overlooked and must be handled differently from your normal on-premises security. To state one of the most obvious items, you do not have complete control of the environment, so encryption is more important then anything else. Location of your data is also another issue you must be aware of, as laws change from country to country, and even State to State. You also need to know how your Cloud provider is securing their systems, which might entail SOC 3 reports, or SOC 2 if you are lucky.

When moving to a Cloud system, it is important to ensure you have a good plan, as well as the knowledge needed to make the move a success. If you do not have the needed skills, outside consultants might be a good move. You never want to buy the first knife someone has made, as you do not want the knife to fall apart the first time you use it, and you certainly don’t want to have all your system in the Cloud and either exposed or unavailable due to a misconfigured environment.