PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Are you migrating to Cloud?
What should you migrate first?
Stay tuned to find out.
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Welcome to Cloud Migration 101, where we share migration tips
and tricks.
I'm Priyanka.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: And I'm Kyle.
And in this episode, we'll walk you
through the process of choosing the first application
to migrate to Google Cloud.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Let's say, today, I'm
the head of engineering at Clow D Corp. We make automated
floodgates for water mills.
As you can imagine, our infrastructure
is complicated with a large number of applications,
and I'm not sure which application to move first.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Well, let me help demystify this process.
Let's start by seeing all of your apps and what they are.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Yes, so here are all our apps.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Ah, the first thing to do
is to group your applications into categories.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: All of my single-tier applications,
multi-tier applications, databases, and dev tools
are grouped together now.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Awesome.
Now we find one common example in each category, something
that does a good job of representing
the entire category.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: For this, we will
have to drill deeper into what makes an app a good candidate
for being the first to migrate.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Exactly.
And there's a list of criteria that I generally recommend.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: All right, let's go through this list
then.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: A good first application to migrate
should be something that's typical of your existing
workloads but nothing that's business-critical.
We want to use this application to build a knowledge
base within our organization around how to migrate
applications to the cloud.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: For this reason,
we should not pick an app that is extremely business-critical,
but we should also not pick an app that is used,
say, a few times a year.
Try to find a balance of moderately business-critical
application so it helps increase the momentum of the migration.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Now, the second criteria
is that we want an application that's
managed by a central team so it has support
and, ideally, has an application owner who embraces innovation.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Picking a high-performance team that
sits in the main office with a proven history of implementing
modern dev practices, DevOps, and SRE
can be a good candidate.
If these apps have leadership sponsors and clear goals,
that would be perfect.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Now, the third criteria
is that we want to try and find something that's
relatively standalone with a low number of network security
and application dependencies and, also,
doesn't need any code refactoring
to move to the cloud.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Stateless apps would be great,
because they don't require any data migration, or an app that
only needs configuration changes, but no code changes.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Next, the data storage requirements
should be relatively small.
If your application has petabytes of storage,
you probably shouldn't use that as a first mover.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: This is mainly
because we don't want to start off with an edge case
by picking an app that is not representative
of most of the other apps.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: The application should also not
be subjected to any complicated compliance or licensing
challenges.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Make sure the licensing terms are clear.
Check if the license allows you to run the app in the cloud
or not.
You may also have specific compliance requirements.
For example, in some countries, the customer
has the right to decide where to store their data.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: For these reasons,
we recommend such apps not be the first ones
that you migrate.
And last, but not least, we want an application that
can afford a cutover window.
If the application has to stay up 100% of the time,
it is not a great candidate for your first mover application.
Your teams are going to be learning with the first mover,
and we want to be able to provide them a cushion, where
if they make a mistake, it's not detrimental to your business.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Since an application,
like batch processing, can tolerate a longer downtime
than the customer-facing apps, it
makes sense to pick batch processing
service over the e-commerce apps,
assuming it meets other criteria,
as we discussed earlier.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Exactly.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Now, let's try
and apply this to our applications at Clow D Corp.
So here's a landscape of applications.
We already grouped the apps based on categories.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Among these apps,
what are some of your high-performance teams?
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Well, inventory, payment, SaaS
and mobile apps, document database, SQL database,
and CI tools are some of our high-performance apps.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: And out of those, which
would require refactoring or migration
has major dependencies that it would require?
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: SaaS and mobile apps,
along with SQL database, have dependencies
and may require refactoring, but others are fairly independent.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: OK, what about serious edge cases?
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: SQL database is huge and also won't
lead to a ton of learning that can apply to other apps,
except for, maybe, another SQL database that is internal,
so that could be a later migration.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Great.
Do any of these have licensing concerns?
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: No, but there are some data compliance things
that we need to take care of around users and data in EU
for our SaaS application, so we cannot start with that.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: OK.
And which of these apps can afford a decent cutover window?
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: CI tools and inventory service
can afford a cutover window, for sure.
Payment service and SQL database has
to be 100% available all the time,
so those will be a no-go for the first phase.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: Well, with that, you have the list of apps
that you want to migrate first.
Start with the inventory app.
Learn from that.
Apply it to the mobile app, the CI tool, the SQL database,
and do that in sequence.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Remember, it's really beneficial
to start small.
Move a very simple application first, and learn a bunch
about how you're going to run your larger and more complex
applications on Google Cloud.
KYLE MOSCHETTO: And by using this approach,
you'll set your business up for a successful migration
to Google Cloud.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: So today, we learned
how to decide what to migrate first.
We started by grouping our apps into categories
and then apply these different categories
to make the right choice.
If you are in the process of migration,
don't forget to like and subscribe,
because we don't want you to miss any episode of this Cloud
Migration 101 series.
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