Cloud Relocation takes planning

Planning for a Cloud Relocation

It is easy to create a new environment in a public IaaS cloud to develop or test a new application.   But it takes planning to relocate a set of applications and shutdown of a legacy infrastructure.   It also takes detailed implementation steps.   I plan on discussing those in future articles.   As CTO of dinCloud, Inc., and as a leader of T3 Dynamics, I have found that there is a limited number of IT leaders and practitioners that have a thorough understanding of the components of a cloud relocation.    

When you relocate applications to an IaaS cloud, the result is the equivalent of a data center transition with a partial outsourcing of IT.   So the topics listed below will not be surprising for experienced IT professionals.   Each, however has a different flavor because this transition is not like any other that has been done before.    I will follow-up with more details on each subject.

Cloud Relocation Planning Topics

• Business Justification
• ROI Cloud vendor selection
• Functional and Non-functional Test planning
• Application regression testing
• Performance testing
•  Security testing
• Failover testing
• Network planning
• Wide area network changes
• IP Address planning
• DNS architecture and vendor selection
• Application architecture planning
• Inventory of applications, data flow and service interdependencies
• Application changes (to remove legacy IP addresses) or re-architect for failover
• Server architecture planning (physical if private cloud; sizing if public cloud)
• Data architecture planning
• Data migration or synchronization
• Design for Disaster recovery
• ITIL Processes change planning
• Security change Planning
• Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery planning
• Plan to decommission of legacy servers and network

The promise of virtualization and cloud computing brings challenges

I find that like most new technologies that offer great promise, the gotchas of virtualization and cloud computing rest in people issues. There are two basic promises of virtualization and IaaS cloud computing.

1. Virtualization - We can squeeze more out of underutilized CapEx in hardware by leveraging the ability to oversubscribe the resources across multiple virtual servers
2. Infrastructure as a Service Cloud Computing - We can automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual instances to fine tune the utilization.

Before you read on, please understand that I think that virtualization and cloud computing are incredibly important to the next phase of evolution for IT enablement of business. I believe the promises are real and important.

So where are the people gotchas? As a discipline, experienced professional IT leaders recognize that it is not only admirable, but required to take on the Sisyphean challenge of implementing standards and process. Standards and process are the only consistently proven approaches to increase predictability of effort and systems, reduce defects, and the resulting long-term cost of ownership. There are three pressures that impede the implementation of standards and processes. a) It is often difficult to show immediate value to the business (a people/strategy sale/trust issue); b) Most people in the IT organization don't think of implementation of standards and process as the "fun" stuff (another people issue); c) Progress toward implementation of standards and process is driven by indivituals and progress is affected by the natural changes in career and life paths of these individuals.

So what has this to do with Virtualization and Cloud Computing? I believe that virtualization and IaaS cloud computing will tend to act as the grease for all of the counter pressures to implementing standards and processes. The ability to rapidly solve a business problem by adding another server or 10 or 800 in minutes or hours without spending capital will drive people to make changes, just this one time, without implementing or following new standards and processes. The personal challenge of tackling the increased complexity offered by virtualized servers, virtualized storage and virtualized switches will drive some engineers to relax the fight against entropy. There are probably 10x more career paths in IT that will come from virtualization and cloud computing. Who would ever thought that a specialization on how to implement virtualized iSCSI to support a VMWare ESXi cluster would have existed even 5 years ago? So people in IT will move for good personal reasons toward new opportunities and away from tuning the machine.

So it is about people. I believe we have the equivalent of a new atomic energy in IT coming from virtualization and cloud computing. This is a great thing that we will eventually harness the old way, by thinking about how we manage and motivate people. Understanding will come from experience and pain.