Ensuring a Seamless App Cloud Migration: A Comprehensive Checklist From a Technological Angle (Part Two)

Our first article revealed the technology aspects you may need to consider when adapting to the cloud. Now, it’s time to look at it from the processes and people’s perspectives. 

Cloud Readiness Assessment From a Process Perspective 

Cloud technology adoption will eventually affect your development and maintenance processes, so ensuring those are also cloud-friendly regarding automation, development methodology, and testing makes sense. 

Development Approach 

Agility is one of the benefits of cloud infrastructure. However, your development processes must also be agile to unlock this benefit. If your project can not be decomposed into smaller sub-projects and provides little possibility to make changes, review, and test quickly, it can be challenging to leverage the cloud service’s advantages fully. 

We highly recommend using an agile approach if you decide to move to the cloud. Agile is defined as an iterative approach to project management. This methodology will give your project room to grow and change, enable continuous integration, and respond quickly to any issues affecting cloud adoption. 

Automation 

Automation also provides agility to your projects, saves costs, and allows you to react to changes faster. Today, automation is an essential part of any development process, and cloud migration is no exception. 

We recommend applying CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) and continuous deployment to automate phases of software delivery. With the help of these practices, you can release new features, improvements, and fixes with incredible speed and accuracy, accelerating your journey to the cloud. 

You can migrate your app to the cloud, even if you’re not embracing automation in your workload. However, it will take much more time and effort. On the other hand, leveraging the automation approach lowers costs, minimizes business disruptions, increases productivity, and keeps your critical applications operating optimally during the migration. 

Testing 

Testing is an integral part of the app development and maintenance life cycle. It is also essential for your cloud migration strategy's success as it helps ensure the migrated application is consistent with all hardware and software your application currently supports. 

Thorough testing will safeguard your application's compelling performance in the cloud environment and provide a superior user experience. With the proven test automation strategy, you can protect smooth migration, avoid database glitches and crash issues, cut costs, and shorten app release cycles. 

Cloud Readiness Assessment From a People Perspective 

Transition to the cloud requires an evaluation of your team's potential and experts capable of supporting both the migration to the cloud and further operations. 

Your current technology staff will stand at the forefront of cloud adoption, and you need to have a closer look at your team assessing their skills and proficiency in the following areas: 

• Previous experience in the application migration and administration of apps in the cloud. 
• Knowledge of tools and technologies required during and after migration. 
• Adoption of the processes essential for a smooth transition to the cloud (agile, testing, CI/CD, etc.)

This assessment allows you to determine what skill and resource gaps you have. You can fill these gaps in different ways: hire a specialist with the necessary skills for your team, set up some cloud training for your in-house team, outsource migration turn-key, or involve cloud consultants. 

Budget Expectations 

Lastly, setting your budget expectations before cloud adoption is crucial. Costs need to be constantly monitored, so it is important to first calculate the TCO (total cost of ownership) both for migration and further operations in the Cloud to meet your budget restrictions. 

The cloud migration costs depend on the size of the initially allocated resources. In addition to the size, your system can consume additional computing power, disk space, and network traffic. This is charged separately. Some of the aspects to consider when calculating the TCO are: 

• Internal hardware and operational expenses (internal infrastructure and software, power and cooling costs, etc.) 
• License costs  
• Infrastructure overhead and management requirements (maintenance, automation, training, etc.) 

It takes less time for a company to migrate its applications to the cloud with minor changes. However, this approach may entail substantial investment into app refinement and optimization after the migration. If your readiness evaluation has unveiled the need for improvement and changes to the current app and processes, preparations and the migration will take longer but will provide more cloud functionality. 

Once you have accomplished the migration process, you must leverage cloud cost control strategies to keep monthly spending in order, track potential budget overruns, and potentially optimize them. For more on cloud costs, check out “How to control cloud infrastructure costs.” 

As you see, there are many ways to check and fine-tune your application for migration.