If I had a penny for every company migrating to the cloud, I’d be rich. I’d be wealthy if the pennies were for every migration that had its cloud costs explode beyond expectations.

In almost all cases, the company decided to do a “lift-and-shift” of their IT estate with little to no optimisation for the cloud. This is why I believe in modernising while in the process of migrating to the cloud.

Why ‘lift-and-shift’ fails

Virtual machines aren’t correctly provisioned
With on-premises environments, the sunk cost of hardware often leads to complacency in optimising workloads. This leads to virtual machines that are over-provisioned because their running cost doesn’t change for the business.

As your business expands, new features are added, and workloads need to scale, leading to more VMs being added. This diminishes your ability to monitor and optimise over time.

The first reason “lift-and-shift” migrations fail is that machines are moved like-for-like to the cloud without optimisation, resulting in much higher costs than on-premises infrastructure.

Workloads aren’t scaled up to meet demand (and scaled down again)
With a finite set of hardware resources, workloads can’t scale up to meet demand and down to reduce cost. Added to the fact that you have already paid for the hardware and want to maximise its usage, you’ll likely opt to run workloads with the maximum resources to successfully handle the demand, even if that is for only eight to 10 hours a day.

This also limits your ability to scale workloads to meet new demand and could potentially lead to an outage and sometimes a loss in revenue.

The second reason is that with the ability to add more resources to workloads (with seemingly unlimited resources), costs “run away”, especially when unchecked. This is further exacerbated by not scaling workloads down when demand is low.

Legacy and proprietary licences aren’t migrated to managed OSS options
In many companies, various products in use have been in the company for years (if not decades). These products are invaluable to daily operations in almost every way.

You’ve likely invested a fortune in licensing and skills to support the product over time, so the desire to move away might not be there. There is also the cost of moving all dependent workloads to other technologies in the short term.

The third reason is that proprietary technology is simply moved to the cloud (often provided as managed solutions) with no change to how it operates or is consumed, and the expenses continue to rise.

How modernising solves the failures

I will admit that in some cases the cost to modernise outweighs the cost to run a workload in the cloud over the medium to long term. In this case, it may be worthwhile to leave this workload as-is with the desire to retire or modernise in the future.

The most important concept to take into any cloud migration is to get rid of the on-premises mindset. While many of the constructs remain the same, the capabilities and tools are vastly different. To cover these, we would need pages worth of writing, so we’ll just cover some fundamentals that will improve the odds of success for your cloud migration.

Consider moving to containers

Containers have been used in production for many years, yet many companies have not yet adopted their capabilities. Moving to containers is a useful step to optimising resource consumption and allowing workloads to scale.

With technologies like Kubernetes, workloads can be managed and allocated to nodes (VMs in a Kubernetes cluster) as efficiently as possible.

Most cloud providers also allow for containers to be run in their own compute tooling, including “serverless” options that allow for these containers to be run when needed.

Moving to containers will provide many options in the cloud migration journey with very little impact on the running application.

Consider moving to open source

For many, open source still has “taboo” written all over it. However, many companies that have adopted modern technology and ways of work heavily rely on open-source work, which is often critical to their success.

As companies mature, they slowly adopt open-source technology, especially around their programming languages, but rarely when it comes to their databases.

Moving from proprietary technologies to their open-source alternatives significantly diminishes the cost to run them. This includes licensing, support and running costs.

The cost to move away might be significant in the short term, but in most cases, the cost to move away outweighs the cost to stay. This effort is often coupled with the move to modern data, which changes the way you handle your data and where it is stored.

All cloud providers have a range of open-source alternatives, which are fully managed and can include priority business support. A move to an open-source database in the cloud, for example, will still provide the business support needed but decrease costs substantially and allow developers to pursue newer ways of writing applications.

Consider moving to ‘cloud native’

One of the concepts I am most passionate about is “cloud native”. I believe that a company deciding to adopt the principles and apply them across their IT landscape will only see benefits over the long term.

Moving to cloud native allows companies to redefine how they build, deploy, run, manage and observe their applications. It aligns people across the company to unify and consider how each person contributes to the success of each workload.

When moving to the cloud, aligning a company with cloud-native principles can be an enormous driver for migration success. Applications will be more resilient, scale up and down with ease, and ultimately result in faster time to market for new features or fixes.

Ready to migrate and modernise?

LSD Open will never just “lift-and-shift” a company to the cloud. We understand that there is too much at stake for a failed migration and have witnessed many situations where a company is stuck paying massive cloud bills instead of innovation, because fundamental principles were not considered.

LSD Open believes in a deep understanding of where a company is at now, where they want to go and then defining how they will get there in the best way possible. There is no cookie-cutter approach to any migration, and thus it’s important to meet you where you are at.

If you’re considering moving to the cloud, in the process of a migration or already feeling the cost pain, we are here to help.

The author, Seagyn Davis, is field chief technology officer for cloud and modernisation at LSD Open
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