The cloud has evolved dramatically over the last 8+ years. Many large-scale migrations undertaken by enterprise customers have had a cloud-first approach, which in many ways, translated into a cloud-hosted strategy. The goal aimed at migrating and rehosting legacy applications in the cloud with low risk and as quickly and cheaply as possible. But moving Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) on the cloud shifted Capex to Opex, eventually resulting in more expensive operations and curtailing ROI on the cloud.
Since a lion-share of applications today are cloud-hosted, what’s the next step in the cloud journey? The natural next step would be to move strategic applications to a cloud-native platform and gain the cost optimization and efficiency that the cloud can provide beyond reducing Capex. Here are a few tips and tricks to ease the transition:
- Create a solid plan
Like with any application transition and migration, a solid plan and strategy is required. Determining which applications to move from cloud-hosted to cloud-native is vital. It is essential to consider if there are any benefits in doing so, such as cost savings, efficiencies in application lifecycle management, quicker deployment, and features. - Design a detailed architecture
Moving monolithic cloud-hosted applications to a cloud-native microservice architecture requires thorough designing and architecting. Cloud-native is about how applications are created and deployed, not where. It thus takes a good deal of thought to determine how to shift towards microservices, containers, DevOps, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). - Train, learn and get developers onboard with cloud-native
Cloud-native is both a mental shift and a model shift. Applications are developed and deployed in a much different way than legacy monolithic applications. Developers should no longer care about the underlying infrastructure on which they are deploying applications and treat it cloud-like. Training existing developers or hiring new experienced cloud-native developers is doubtless a requirement. If it seems like a struggle to build this expertise in-house, like it is for many companies who want the benefits to be cloud-native but cannot get there themselves, engage a partner to get the job done.
