Are you interested in learning about cloud migrations? If so this video is for you.
Hi, my name is Michael Gibbs and I'm the founder and CEO of GoCloud Architects and we're an
organization dedicated towards building high performance cloud computing careers. I've
been working in technology for over 25 years now, and I've been coaching or mentoring others
to get their first tech job or get promoted in tech for over two decades. Today, we're
going to talk about the topic of cloud migrations, more specifically, we're going to talk about
the lift and shift migration, the cloud native migration, and a hybrid of these two approaches,
and we're going to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the cloud native migration
versus the lift and shift migration and why you should choose them given various situations,
because as an architect, you're a designer and you're going to be doing a lot of cloud
migrations. So whether it's lift and shift migration or whether it's a cloud native migration,
that's going to be up to you based upon the business needs and goals, at least based upon
your recommendations.
So we're going to begin with the lift and shift migration. Now I'm a fan of the lift
and shift migration because it's simple. What is the lift and shift migration, which is
the most common form, by the way, it's basically you take your systems from the data center
and migrate them to the cloud, data center to cloud. Cloud is really nothing more than
a virtualized network in a data center, so take whatever's in your network and data center,
move it to the cloud, simple and elegant. What's so great about it? Well, basically
you just take your virtual machines and copy them and move them over, launch them on the
cloud and everything is up and running, so simple. Now, what else is good about it? There's
no refactoring of your applications for the most part, just take it and move it, so simple
and easy.
What else is so good? The same way you copy them from the data center and move them to
the cloud, if it doesn't work with your cloud provider, take them off the cloud provider,
stick them right back in your data center, win, win, win. Or if you're in one cloud provider
and they're not working out for you or they can't meet your performance needs, you can
migrate it to another cloud provider. Or if the cloud provider raises your rates and you
don't like it you can come off the cloud provider, or it's happened in the US, there was one
of the major cloud providers, they had a customer and they didn't agree with the customer's
business, the customer was a cloud native customer, the cloud provider kicked them off
of the cloud and the customer went completely out of business.
So whenever you do things with a lift and shift, it's easy to get on, easy to get off,
and you're in complete control. Provider raises your rates, no big deal, bring it back to
your data center or go to another cloud, want to do multi-cloud, no big deal. So that's
the lift and shift, which is the safest and the simplest and it's the majority of cloud
migrations today.
The next type of cloud migration is the cloud native migration, and there's a lot of wonderful
things about the cloud native migration. A cloud native migration is basically taking
what you have in the data center, refactoring it, redesigning it to work on the cloud. Now
think about that cloud native migration, you've basically had to recode all your applications
which can be really expensive and can be incredibly time-consuming, but once you do and you move
them to the cloud, well, things get pretty interesting. See, with the cloud when you're
going cloud native, you can really take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. All these basically
unlimited scalability factors, kind of nice, not managing operating systems, not patching
things, basically that's really great, less security for you to work on because a lot
of the things are secured by the provider, still lots of security to do, but less of
it. So cloud native basically means unlimited scalability and simplicity and elegance. When
you're using the cloud, the cloud native means a lot of huge expenses related to refactoring
your applications to big and bring them to the cloud.
Now, after you've spent millions or hundreds of millions of dollars refactoring your applications
based upon the size of the organization, if there's something wrong with your cloud provider,
you are stuck. If they raise your rates, you are stuck because it could cost you potentially
hundreds of millions of dollars to refactor your applications to get off of that cloud
provider, go back to your data center, or even or another cloud provider.
So, you know, granted that's based upon the scale of the organization, but cloud native
big refactoring, huge expenses to go to the cloud. When you're on the cloud, you probably
realistically have more scalability, but if the cloud provider doesn't like you or they
choose to kick you off, you're out of business. So this option is limited for people that
are basically on the cloud and are totally comfortable with the cloud and don't mind
spending the money and have less concern. Cloud native is really elegant if it's a brand
new deployment because you've got nothing to worry about, so you can just do it right
the first case. Why design your applications one way and then refactor them again? Design
them all to be cloud native in the beginning, so for a new customer, this can be really
great.
So we talked about the lift and shift migration, which is copying your things and moving them
to the cloud. We talked about the cloud native migration, which is basically refactor your
applications and then move them to the cloud. Now let's talk about the hybrid. Now we love
this hybrid approach, we find it to be the best in our perspective. What do we love about
it? We get all of the benefits of lift and shift, the safety, the protection, the simplicity,
and we take advantage of a lot of the scalability factors of the clouds.
So what could this look like? Let's say you have a three tier web environment. Let's say
we've got a web, app, and a database, and let's say you're using servers or virtual
machines for your web and your application, and you're using these other servers for your
database, which is an Apache Cassandra database. Why would you be using Apache Cassandra? You
might need a very scalable, no SQL database, and Apache Cassandra is a very common one
to use. So let's say you want to migrate this to the cloud, let's say you take images of
your virtual machines for the web, so basically you take your web virtual machine and you
copy it to an AMI and you launch it on the cloud with a similar size machine, great.
You do the same thing for app here, and now the database, and instead of bringing over
your servers and on [inaudible 00:05:46] two instances on Amazon or different one on Google
computer engine and installing a Linux operating system, and then after you install the operating
system install Apache Cassandra, you could just use Keyspaces, which is a fully managed
service which doesn't require any refactor applications. So this is where we hybridize
them, use virtual machines for the web and the app, and then use the managed database,
and we get a lot of the scalability and a lot of the cool things and a lot of the cloud
native things, while getting the safety and the simplicity of coming on and off the cloud.
So we typically love this mix and it's one of the ways we typically design our architecture
is because we liked the flexibility, the control, the safety, but we still love those cloud
native features.
We hope we've given you some understanding on the cloud native migration, the lift and
shift migration, and kind of this hybrid approach of the both. We want you to know understand
how to do this so you can be in the best position to design the perfect cloud architecture for
your customers. Let me tell you about some free things we do at GoCloud Architects to
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