The 7 R's Cloud Migration Strategies
A Bit About Strategy
A successful R cloud migration strategy involves careful planning and execution to ensure a smooth transition of R-based applications, data, and processes to the cloud environment. Here are seven key steps to consider when creating an R cloud migration strategy:
7 R's : -
Re-host (“Lift and Shift”)
Relocate (“Hypervisor-Level Lift and Shift”)
Replatform (“Lift and Reshape”)
Refactor (“Re-architect”)
Repurchase (“Drop and Shop”)
Retire
Retain (“Revisit”)
The rehost migration strategy involves leveraging cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings to redeploy workloads on a cloud instance. The strategy allows enterprises to move an on-prem application and all its dependencies as-is to the cloud.
Without changing the core infrastructure, this approach allows organizations to transfer all application data and workflows to cloud services that match the workload’s existing storage, networking, and compute requirements. Since operational and configuration constructs of workloads remain intact, the rehost strategy is also easy to perform and is suitable for enterprises that lack in-house cloud-native expertise.
The newly introduced strategy involves migrating workloads without impacting ongoing operations, rewriting the application source code, or acquiring new hardware. With this strategy, an enterprise can migrate a collection of servers from an on-premises platform, such as Kubernetes or VMware, to a cloud version of the same platform. An example is managed Kubernetes services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
Relocating minimizes downtime and disruption since clients remain seamlessly connected during the migration process. As this strategy doesn’t require significant changes in the configuration and architecture of workloads, it’s not necessary to retrain staff or invest in upgraded hardware, thereby reducing operating expenses. The strategy also makes migration costs more predictable by placing clear limits on scalability.
With the replatform strategy, an enterprise can move an application to the cloud while employing some form of platform optimization to leverage cloud-native capabilities. The application’s source code and core architecture remain unchanged, keeping legacy applications operational while ensuring cloud-based compliance and security.
The replatform migration strategy increases the flexibility, agility, and resilience of workloads while enabling cloud-native capabilities such as automation.
The strategy also saves time and migration costs since enterprises can modernize workloads without rewriting application code. It allows organizations to choose components for modernization, subsequently improving application agility and maximizing ROI. Since the application’s architecture and functionality are retained, teams don’t require extensive training to operate the migrating workloads.
Often considered the most complex migration option, refactoring involves re-architecting workloads to support cloud-native capabilities from the ground up. Although this strategy requires a huge investment in effort and resources, it’s considered the most future-proof migration approach. It allows applications to support advanced capabilities such as serverless computing, autoscaling, and distributed load balancing.
Refactoring helps break down a monolithic application into microservices to achieve high availability and enhanced levels of automation that are often complex to achieve with in-house deployments. While rearchitecting applications for service-oriented architecture may turn out to be costly during the migration phase, a well-planned resulting framework’s operating costs are substantially lower than operating the legacy framework.
The repurchase migration strategy involves swapping internally administered systems for third-party managed services available from the cloud provider. Repurchasing helps teams retire legacy systems and move to a consumption-based, SaaS subscription model that ties IT costs to generated revenue. As the services are built and managed by third-party vendors, the repurchase model reduces operational efforts toward managing infrastructure for in-house teams.
The repurchase option also simplifies and expedites migration while reducing downtime and enhancing scalability and efficient regulatory governance. As the migration approach fully leverages cloud-native capabilities, it’s mostly leveraged for workloads that require enhanced application performance and user experience while minimizing operational overheads.
This strategy is used when terminating or downsizing applications that are no longer useful in production. In such instances, business-critical workloads that operate on inefficient legacy frameworks are retired as the first step towards the adoption of modern, cloud-native deployments.
This strategy is suitable for applications that cannot be retired and should continue to operate in their existing framework. Enterprises typically decide to retain a workload if it relies on another application that needs to be migrated first or when there’s no immediate business value in migrating the application to the cloud. As for vendor-based applications, an enterprise may also choose to retain if the service provider plans to eventually release a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.
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