What is cloud migration? And how can automation help?

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Cloud migration is the process of moving applications, workloads, data, and other digital resources to a public or private cloud. Many businesses looking to modernize outdated IT infrastructure and legacy applications choose cloud migration to help them transition from traditional, on-premise environments to container-based, cloud-native solutions.

Migrating to the cloud is an essential part of IT modernization, but it’s not always simple. Planning a cloud migration can be complicated, often requiring coordination between multiple teams across the business. And even though it offers long-term cost savings, vendor lock-in and the cost of planning a migration need to be considered before a cloud migration can move forward.

A strong cloud migration strategy is necessary to address the challenges of moving to the cloud. As a part of that strategy, businesses often choose to employ automation technologies to help migrate, manage, and optimize workloads across environments—accelerating the migration journey, maximizing the value of cloud investment, and reducing the risk of errors.

Explore the benefits of automation in a cloud space

Cloud migration is a broad cloud computing term that can refer to several different processes. In most cases, it means 1 of the following:

  • Moving workloads from an on-premise datacenter to a public or private cloud
  • Moving workloads from 1 cloud environment to another
  • Moving an application from traditional infrastructure to a cloud-native environment—also known as application refactoring—to take advantage of public cloud services

Cloud migration can be a heavy lift for organizations running complex systems, but continuing to operate on legacy infrastructure is expensive and risky.

A business operating on legacy systems usually has skilled IT professionals who spend a significant amount of time on repetitive, manual tasks to keep operations running smoothly. These efforts take employees away from more valuable, strategic, and innovative work and introduce more opportunities for human error to cause service downtime. Legacy systems also introduce compatibility and security issues, increasing the likelihood that an organization will suffer data breaches and unplanned outages.

To mitigate these risks, organizations need to develop a comprehensive cloud migration strategy to successfully move data, existing applications, and workloads to more flexible, cloud-native environments. This process includes choosing the right cloud provider, managing costs, navigating complex architectures, applying data governance policies, and managing downtime.

While cloud migration efforts may require significant planning and resources, businesses that migrate to a public or private cloud get access to the latest innovations offered by cloud services—without carrying the risks associated with operating outdated infrastructure.

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Reduce IT costs
Moving workloads and applications to the cloud allows you to avoid the costs associated with monolithic, legacy applications and services and take advantage of pay-per-use billing. Because public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure also take on more responsibility for infrastructure management, businesses may benefit from lower operating costs—leaving more room in your budget to invest in innovation.

Improve scalability and performance
By reducing upfront costs and eliminating the physical limitations of hosting workloads on premise, migrating to cloud infrastructure provides organizations with the flexibility to scale workloads up or down as needed to accommodate variable compute utilization. Cloud migration also lets businesses host applications on infrastructure located in closer geographical proximity to the end user—reducing network latency and improving the user experience.

Enhance security and compliance
In traditional environments, patching and security management can be challenging or inconsistent due to resource constraints, limitations on downtime, and a lack of integration or visibility across tools.

Cloud providers, on the other hand, offer a wide range of first- and third-party tools and services to increase security, protect sensitive data, and comply with industry standards and government regulations. They often take on most of the infrastructure responsibilities, and they offer customers policy and administration tools that can simplify security management.

Accelerate adoption
Organizations using cloud-native application platforms don’t have to worry about managing certain services (load balancing, service routing, etc.). These services are handled by the cloud platform or the cloud provider, allowing businesses to devote more time and resources to growth and innovation.

Increase convenience
Because you can access cloud services from anywhere, both IT administrators and business customers benefit from being able to use tools and resources whenever and wherever it’s most convenient.

There are several common strategies used in cloud migrations:

  • Refactoring/re-architecting: Making major changes to an application to give it cloud-native capabilities that improve its performance.
  • Replatforming (“lift and optimize”): Making small changes to an application to improve its performance, and then moving that application to a cloud-native environment.
  • Rehosting/relocating (“lift and shift”): Moving applications, infrastructure, workloads, virtual machines, or operating systems to the cloud without rewriting code, adopting new hardware, or changing existing configurations.
  • Rebuilding/rewriting: Completely rewriting an application to be cloud native. By starting from scratch, businesses can make strategic decisions about the cloud capabilities and tools they want to include in the new version of the application.
  • Retiring and replacing: Discontinuing an existing application or product, and adopting a new cloud-native application through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) licensing model.

Which strategy a company chooses depends on several factors, including time, budget, and where they are in their cloud adoption journey. For example, businesses that are just starting to adopt cloud technologies might choose an initial migration strategy that doesn’t require them to make big changes to applications, infrastructure, or workloads. They might choose to rehost or replatform an application when they first migrate it to the cloud, and then refactor that application later to give it cloud-native capabilities that improve performance, scalability, and agility.

Other companies that have already moved operations to the cloud might decide to completely rebuild an application, opting to take full advantage of cloud technologies from the beginning of the process.

Large cloud providers, also known as hyperscalers, offer a variety of cloud deployment options—giving organizations the ability to choose cloud infrastructure that best suits their business needs. These options include public, private, hybrid, and multicloud deployments.

public cloud is hosted on hardware that’s owned and maintained by the cloud provider. This hardware is automatically provisioned and allocated among multiple customers—meaning it can scale easily in response to fluctuations in demand.

private cloud is a cloud-based environment hosted on hardware dedicated to a single organization. Sometimes the hardware is owned and operated by the cloud provider, but in other cases, the hardware is located in an organization’s datacenter and the cloud provider takes on the responsibility of managing the cloud environment. This deployment model is popular in the healthcare and financial services industries, where companies can’t or won’t host IT resources on shared hardware because of security policies and regulatory compliance requirements.

The hybrid cloud model has become increasingly more common and involves using some combination of public and private cloud infrastructure. Organizations may operate at least 1 public cloud and at least 1 private cloud, or a bare-metal environment connected to at least 1 cloud. In a hybrid cloud model, there’s some level of orchestration or integration between each environment and the movement of workloads between these environments.

Similar to hybrid cloud, multicloud deployments involve migrating applications and workloads to multiple environments—but the term usually refers to the use of more than 1 cloud service from more than 1 cloud vendor. The clouds may be public or private, but they’re not necessarily interconnected and each environment can be managed separately.

Many organizations use a variety of tools to migrate applications, workloads, data, and other resources to cloud environments, which can lead to inconsistencies that slow down or disrupt the modernization journey. Cloud automation—the application of IT automation to cloud technologies and environments—helps maximize efficiencies and eliminate redundancies, so you get the most out of your cloud investment.

Incorporating automation into your cloud migration plan can help you:

Lower migration costs
Automation tools are generally more cost-effective because they can consistently perform processes without human intervention across bare-metal, hybrid cloud, and multicloud environments.

Reduce migration time
Automation minimizes the need to rely on time-consuming, manual tasks during the migration process—speeding up the initial stages of migration and leaving IT teams more time to focus on other priorities.

Minimize business disruption
Because automation reduces the risk of human error, organizations that automate the migration of their workloads and resources to the cloud experience less downtime and data loss.

Unite environments
Most organizations rely on a combination of public cloud, private cloud, and cloud-native infrastructure. Automation helps connect these environments by increasing visibility and oversight across teams and resources.

Manage Day 2 operations
Once you’ve migrated workloads, applications, and data to the cloud, automation can be used to efficiently manage all Day 2 operations. Automating cloud operations ensures that everything is working as intended, is maintained as needed, and remains compliant, reducing the burden on technical staff.

Learn how to automate your hybrid cloud at scale

With Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform, you can choose the approach to automating cloud migration that works for you. Three flexible cloud migration strategies are backup and restore, scan and re-create, and shifting to Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Backup and restore
The backup and restore method is a classic strategy for migrating to the cloud from traditional virtual machines and architectures. It involves:

  1. Backing up your existing infrastructure data and configurations in a datastore or repository
  2. Provisioning new infrastructure in your cloud environment
  3. Restoring to the new instances by installing the required applications
  4. Applying the backup configurations
  5. Uploading the data

Scan and re-create
The scan and re-create approach uses Ansible facts—pieces of system data or host properties—to capture configuration settings. Once your base instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux® has been provisioned on your cloud, those captured configuration settings are applied to the environment.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
With the Infrastructure as Code method, infrastructure provisioning and orchestration is handled through code instead of manual processes. Ansible facts are used to locate configuration information and other data about your environment and create a single source of truth for your infrastructure. This source of truth is defined in code, making it easier to deploy in your new cloud environment or shift the infrastructure to a new environment. It also ensures consistency, reliability, and repeatability.
 

In each of these approaches to automated cloud migration, the final step is to validate the operational state of your cloud environment to confirm that it’s behaving as intended.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform speeds up cloud migration by eliminating many of the manual processes associated with infrastructure configuration and provisioning. With a single management layer and reusable automation workflows, Ansible Automation Platform also supports hybrid and multicloud operations by unifying automation architecture across legacy, cloud, and cloud-native environments.

Whether you’re looking to move workloads from legacy infrastructure to a public cloud, between public clouds, or from traditional compute architectures to cloud-native application platforms, Ansible Automation Platform helps you streamline cloud adoption with the migration strategy that works best for your organization. 

Explore hybrid cloud automation with Ansible Automation Platform

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