Welcome to
Virtualization and Beyond
Key Considerations for Moving Applications to the Public Cloud
By Steven Hunt, Sr. Product Manager and Strategist, SolarWinds
So, you have decided (or maybe it has been decided for you)
that it is time to move one or more of your current application workloads to
the public cloud. As previously addressed in "Transitioning
Workloads from the Data Center to the Cloud,"
there are several reasons why an organization might select infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) as the desired platform to host an application workload that is currently
running in the data center, but there are several aspects that need to be
understood before moving forward with this transition.
Sizing
Provisioning of virtualization resources in a private data
center is usually more liberal than what is typically necessary. While some
organizations do invest in understanding the performance requirements of each
application workload and provisions only the resources necessary, many
organizations still prescribe to a methodology of provisioning from a
predefined set of resources, which may or may not be fully optimized for the requirements
of the guest application workloads. When transitioning to IaaS, it's very
important determine the resource requirements of your application workload,
including CPU, memory, storage and network, and selecting the proper cloud
resources to ensure optimal performance.
Cost
Properly sizing your workloads is not only important to the
performance of your workload, but it also has implications on the cost of
running those workloads in the cloud. When moving to a cloud solution like
IaaS, organizations need to determine what their reoccurring costs will be. These
reoccurring costs are based on factors like what type resources and how much
will be consumed, as well as a few others vendor-dependent factors. Public
cloud vendors like Amazon have online calculators
that can help with better understanding what those costs can be. It's easy to
see how right-sizing application workloads has a major impact on the
reoccurring costs that will be incurred.
Network
Another implication when moving application workloads to the
public cloud is associated with aspects of the network connectivity. There a
number of scenarios that will have to be considered and accounted for. For
example:
-
Will public, end user access need to be configured?
-
Do secure, private networks need to be
configured?
-
Will applications running in the public cloud
need access to resources still running in the private data center?
-
Which public cloud data center will the
application workload be deployed to, and what impacts will that have on any of
the other network implications mentioned above?
Test
Above all else, it is important to test your application
workload in the cloud before engaging in a full production deployment.
Beginning the move to the cloud by simply deploying the workload for testing and
performance
monitoring purposes only can speed up the requirement discovery process and
ensure all the issues are worked out before the workload is put into production.
Trial and error can sometimes be the best test mechanism when too many unknowns
might exists.
Conclusion
While this is not a complete list of all the factors that
must be considered when transitioning an application workload to the public
cloud, it does allow many crucial aspects of the move to be better understood.
Carefully planning the move and leaving no stone unturned will allow for a
successful cloud deployment and finally bring your application workloads into
the modern cloud era.
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About the Author
Steven has been
involved in the IT industry for more than 10 years, focusing on server-based
computing, desktop virtualization, end user computing and server virtualization
solutions for SMB to enterprise environments. Currently, he is responsible for
product strategy for server and application monitoring and virtualization management at SolarWinds.