Fork-lifting Into The Cloud vs Optimizing In The Cloud

By Ruby Nahal, Senior Engineer

 If you are a business who has decided to dive into the countless benefits of the “cloud approach” to boost innovation and thus boost productivity, growth and profitability, the next decision is the migration approach. Many different methodologies can be used to migrate to the cloud. Normally you want to really plan this sort of a thing instead of diving head first and using the lowest effort method of fork-lifting your current infrastructure into the cloud.

I will use my cloud platform of choice, Amazon web services, as an example (this is not to say that any of the other cloud approaches out there, are in any way inferior to AWS).

Now, with AWS, there are 100s of different services offered which may align with optimizing your infrastructure in the cloud. You may be a small organization and it may make more sense to use the active directory in AWS rather than building, maintaining and backing up your active directory servers in AWS. You may be running a SQL database cluster and yes, fork-lifting it in the cloud may take least amount of effort but it may be running server 2003 R2 and the RDS services in AWS along with read replicas and high availability which may far surpass the scalability and availability that the fork-lifted servers will ever offer.

You optimize for AWS which requires way more effort and planning but allows you to efficiently utilize resources at all times. The auto scaling service for example, means you will not pay for compute resources that you don’t need. In addition to the efficiency achieved with auto scaling, AWS infrastructure can be made highly available using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and other services. In order to avoid potential issues with your applications, you need to build in redundancy and security to various layers of your AWS environment.

The key is in the planning.

Many businesses who have already decided to go the “cloud” way find it hard to get past the planning phase because at first the solution you are looking at may seem extremely overwhelming. If done right, once deployed you will realize the financial and operational benefits of an optimized AWS environment. There might be scenarios where fork-lifting may have to be part of the migration plan due to legacy constraints. So in this case you may need to start where you can see some immediate value, keeping in mind that future project should aim to be “cloud native”.

But in cases where the forklift migration method to AWS might seem like the only option for some people only because of lack of internal resources or experience, it may be best to find the right people to successfully handle an AWS migration. We at TekTegrity have experienced, AWS certified engineers who can help you lay out a plan for the migration path and deploy an optimized AWS cloud migration to revolutionize the way you conduct your business.

About Ruby //@RubyNahal // Ruby hails from India with a flair for cooking traditional cuisine and a deep love of learning (you may find her buried in a book, non-fiction of course) and a real passion for all things tech. For her, enhancing people’s lives via well-executed technology solutions has always been more than a job, and it also makes Ruby a perfect fit for our team; she gets our mission to the core. As far as technical chops, Ruby is bar none. She holds a Master’s Degree in IT, multiple certifications and awards in Network and Security Administration, led several R & D teams and worked for five years as an Infrastructure Architect in Canada. Need we say more?