MomentumSI provides customers an effective on-ramp to cloud environments. Our teams have successfully migrated dozens of our clients to a cloud based environment, including public and private clouds. Cloud Migrations typically fall into one of three categories:

• Lift-and-shift = Fast, economical, focus is on pricing advantage.
• Lift-and-refit = Efficient, moderately priced, take advantage of some cloud services without major investment.
• Cloud Modernization = More costly up front, but takes full advantage of cloud agility, elasticity and pricing.

Lift-and-Shift Migration

In a ‘Lift-and-Shift’, the emphasis is on migration speed (and cost). Systems are moved from their current location (e.g., a hosting provider or internal data center) and are moved to a cloud provider with little or no change to the architecture or configuration. Because energy isn’t spent rethinking the architecture, the time required to make a move it typically very quick. The downside of this approach is that the application may not be leveraging the elastic properties of the cloud like auto-scaling. In Lift-and-Shift the cloud is treated as an on-demand, pay-per-use hosting environment.

Lift-and-Refit Migration

A popular approach to cloud migrations is the ‘Lift-and-Refit’. Here, the applications are redeployed onto a cloud with a moderate number of changes that allow them to take advantage of many of the popular cloud capabilities such as:

• Auto-healing & recovery
• Data backup & restore
• Auto-scaling (up/down) based on current or predicted usage
• Orchestrated provisioning
• Monitoring & alerting

In a Lift-and-Refit, there are typically no code changes made to the system. The refitting occurs outside of the code by repackaging the software and giving the cloud environment enough information about the software to automate common operational activities, leading to reduced maintenance.

Cloud Modernization

In a Cloud Modernization effort, the application is redesigned from the ground-up with the assumption that it will be deployed in a cloud environment. Reengineering applications for a native cloud environment provide the greatest degree of flexibility however are also the most costly in the short term. Over time, the new application may provide enough benefits related to reduced administrative costs, reduced computing charges or other cost recovery vehicles to warrant an over-haul. Common changes made in a re-engineering effort include:

• Moving from a stateful to stateless service design
• Reducing storage costs by using scale-out storage strategies
• Sun-setting fixed networking approaches in favor of software defined networking (SDN)
• Removing expensive commercial software licenses in favor of open cloud friendly licenses like open source
• Switching from disk intensive designs to large memory footprints

Migrating to Popular Clouds

MomentumSI offers migration services to a number of public clouds including:

• Amazon Web Services
• Windows Azure
• Google Compute
• vCloud solutions

Let us know if there are questions we can answer for you!