Cloud Migration and Cloud Architecture Design

Organizations must continuously acquire new customers, satisfying their needs while working in a fiercely competitive environment. Today’s organizations must be more agile to respond to increasing customer demands, which requires quickly scaling up to millions of customers and scaling down as needed without impacting the budget. Cloud migration could be the answer to achieving agility and speed. The cloud enables frequent application releases and reduces costs by applying automation and data center consolidation.

The cloud is becoming essential for every enterprise strategy. Most organizations decrease spending by moving into the public cloud and, in addition to saving costs, they convert upfront capital expenditure into operational expenditure. Many start-ups born in the last decade started in the cloud and were fueled by cloud infrastructure for rapid growth. As enterprises move to the cloud, they must focus on cloud migration...

Public, private, and hybrid clouds

There are three different types of cloud models: public, private, and hybrid.

The public cloud is based on the standard computing model in which a service provider makes resources such as virtual machines (VMs), applications, and storage available to customers over the internet. In the cloud computing model, a public cloud vendor provides on-demand availability of IT resources, such as the server, database, network, and storage, which organizations can use with secure web-based interfaces or through application programs over the internet. Public cloud services offer a pay-as-you-go model and, in most cases, the customer only pays for the services they are using for the duration of utilization, saving them costs by optimizing IT resources to reduce idle time.

You can think of the public cloud as an electric power supply model, where you switch on the light and pay only for the amount of electricity you use in units. You stop paying for it...

Solution architecture in the public cloud

Solution architecture in the cloud has become increasingly important and is becoming the “new normal” as more enterprises choose to migrate their workload to it. The public cloud has been a critical factor fueling start-up organizations’ growth, as they only need a small upfront investment rather than investing upfront in costly on-premises solutions. It allows organizations to be run as an experiment, and to be agile and innovative.

The great thing about cloud computing architecture is that you have an end-to-end view of all architecture components, including the frontend platforms, the application development platform, servers, storage, database, automation, delivery, and the networks that are required to manage the entire solution landscape.

Let’s learn more about the public cloud architecture.

Public cloud architecture

A typical definition of the public cloud is a fully virtualized environment...

Creating a cloud migration strategy

Your strategy for the cloud helps you to determine a migration strategy and prioritize applications. These are some of the reasons that can trigger an initiative for cloud migration and hybrid cloud strategies:

• The data center needs a technology refresh
• The data center’s lease is ending
• The data center has run out of storage and computing capacity
• Modernization of an application
• To leverage cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI, advanced analytics, machine learning, IoT, and so on
• The need to optimize IT resources to save on operational costs
• Disaster recovery planning and operational resilience
• To utilize a content distribution network for the website
• To reduce upfront capital expenditures and eliminate maintenance costs
• To increase workforce efficiency and productivity
• To improve business agility

Every organization has a different strategy, and one...

Choosing a cloud migration strategy

Choosing the right migration strategy for cloud adoption for your business drivers is critical. Consider various constraints such as financial, resources, time, and skills. You can compare the effort required for the different strategies covered in the previous section in the following table. The bars in the table depict the amount of time and cost required for each strategy and the level of the optimization opportunity.

Migration Strategy	Description	Time and Cost	Optimization Opportunities
Refactor	Rearchitect applications into a more modularized form to make them cloud-native
...

Steps for cloud migration

In the previous section, you learned about different migration strategies and you may have started to group your applications to apply the appropriate migration technique. These strategies are also known as the 7 Rs (retain, retire, relocate, rehost, repurchase, replatform, and refactor), and some or all of them could be part of your cloud journey.

Since you may need to migrate and manage multiple applications in the cloud, it’s advisable to set up a cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) and standardize this process with a cloud migration factory. The cloud CoE includes experienced people from various IT and business teams across the organization who act as a dedicated cloud team focused on accelerating the building of cloud expertise in the organization. The cloud migration factory defines migration processes and tools, as well as the steps that need to be taken, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 3.4: Cloud migration steps

As shown...

Creating a hybrid cloud architecture

The value of the cloud is growing, and many large enterprises are moving their workload to the cloud. However, often, it’s not possible to entirely move to the cloud on day one, and for most customers, this is a journey. Those customers seek a hybrid cloud model where they maintain a part of the application in an on-premises environment that needs to communicate with the cloud module.

In a hybrid deployment, you must establish connectivity between the resources running in the on-premises and cloud environments. The most common method of hybrid deployment is between the cloud and existing on-premises infrastructure to extend and grow an organization’s infrastructure into the cloud while connecting cloud resources to the internal system. The common reasons for setting up a hybrid cloud may include the following:

• You want to have operating legacy applications in an on-premises environment while you refactor and deploy...

Taking a multi-cloud approach

Before the cloud existed, organizations used multiple vendors to use the best of the breed and avoid vendor lock-in. As more public cloud players enter the market, organizations seek to create a multi-cloud approach. A multi-cloud approach utilizes two or more public cloud providers to serve organization infrastructure and technology needs. The multi-cloud strategy could be a mix of major public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM, and so on. Organizations can share their workload between clouds based on geographical availability, technical capabilities, and cost. They can also combine the multi-cloud approach with on-premises.

Some of the significant advantages of adopting a multi-cloud strategy are as follows:

• Vendor flexibility: With multi-cloud, you can choose between vendors and retain your negotiation power, agility, and flexibility. In the event of a missed service-level agreement (SLA), you can switch...

Implementing CloudOps

The cloud operations model, called CloudOps, is a framework of rules and guidelines that organizations establish, monitor, and adjust to manage costs, enhance efficiency, and mitigate security risks in their cloud infrastructure, security, and operations. This operational model is a guiding principle for aligning people, processes, and technology with cloud-related tasks, including security, budget management, and compliance across cloud workloads.

The CloudOps model provides several key benefits:

• Unlocking speed and agility: Organizations can harness the agility and rapid response capabilities inherent in cloud services, accelerating cloud adoption and application modernization efforts as part of their digital transformation journey.
• Leveraging automation for efficiency: Automation reduces manual errors and interventions by streamlining routine tasks, freeing up valuable resources and time.
• Consistent governance at scale: Cloud governance...

CloudOps pillars

In the process of planning your CloudOps strategy, it is crucial to adopt a comprehensive 360-degree perspective. The goal is to provision and manage your cloud environment with a focus on business agility and governance control. Establishing a robust CloudOps model, irrespective of your cloud migration journey, allows you to achieve consistent governance and streamlined operations across diverse infrastructure environments. This strategic approach enables you to optimize critical resources, leading to accelerated delivery of business outcomes, faster time-to-market, and improved safety, efficiency, and cost control.

The diagram below illustrates the key pillars of the CloudOps model, encompassing complete IT workload automation coverage.

Figure 3.9: CloudOps pillars

The following are the fundamental pillars of CloudOps, as depicted in the diagram:

1. Set up governance: Create a robust, well-architected, and multi-account cloud environment...

Summary

In this chapter, you explored the fundamental aspects of solution architecture in the public cloud. You also learned about cloud-native and hybrid architecture, gaining a comprehensive understanding of cloud computing and its benefits.

We began with a comparison between public, private, and hybrid clouds, helping you to grasp the different cloud deployment models and their respective use cases.

We then defined the public cloud concept in more detail through its architecture and introduced some popular public cloud providers.

Furthermore, you delved into cloud-native architecture, gaining insights into the advantages of adopting a cloud-native architecture, such as enhanced scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency.

With a solid public cloud fundamentals foundation, we discussed creating a cloud migration strategy. Different migration approaches were explored in detail, including lift and shift, rehost, replatform, relocate, refactor, repurchase, retain...

Further reading

To learn more about the major public cloud providers, please refer to the following links:

• Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com):
  • AWS for Solutions Architects by Saurabh Shrivastava, Neelanjali Srivastav, Alberto Artasanchez, and Imtiaz Sayed: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/180323895X
  • AWS Well-Architected Framework: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/
• Google Cloud Platform (https://cloud.google.com):
  • GCP Cloud Architecture Framework: https://cloud.google.com/architecture/framework
• Microsoft Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com):
  • Azure Well-Architected: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/cloud-enablement/well-architected#reliability
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): https://www.oracle.com/cloud/
• Alibaba Cloud: https://us.alibabacloud.com
• IBM Cloud: https://www.ibm.com/cloud

Almost every cloud provider...