Cloud Migration Approach
Ankur Kumar
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When it comes to cloud migration or adoption, often organizations get into the practice of building a cloud migration framework before the migration. While having a cloud migration strategy is essential for successful cloud migration, it does not necessitate to build your own cloud migration framework.
During the assessment or discovery phase itself, you can start leveraging the below frameworks based upon your cloud vendor selection:

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

Key highlights of the framework (Click Here to read more on AWS website):

#1 – Uses Perspectives to provide focus areas for managing different work streams

AWS Cloud Adoption Perspectives
AWS Perspectives (Slide layout courtesy: slidesgo.com)

#2 – Provides Guidance on Applying 6’R Migration Strategy

AWS Cloud 6R Approach
Image Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/6-strategies-for-migrating-applications-to-the-cloud/

#3 – Provides strategy on large-scale planning to accelerate cloud deployment

Read more details about large-scale migration by clicking here.

AWS Cloud Adoption for Large Organization
Image Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com

#4 – Provides Architecture Best Practices for Evaluation

AWS recommends to leverage their AWS Well-Architected Framework to assess & evaluate design decisions made throughout the cloud adoption journey. Read more about framework by clicking here.
It is centered around five pillars of architecture – Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency & Cost Optimization.

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework

Key highlights of the framework (Click here to read more on Microsoft’s website):

#1 – Defines Cloud Migration Journey as 6 Stages

Click here for Infographics of 6 stages using Azure.

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework
Image Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/migration/migration-journey/#migrate

#2 – Provides Application Migration Strategy

It groups application migration approach into 5 R’s – Rehost, Refactor, Rearchitect, Rebuild & Replace. Click here to read more.

#3 – Provides Microsoft Assessment Tools to Keep Track of Journey

Click here to access Azure assessment tools, which includes:

  • Azure Well-Architected Review – Provides assessment tool for each focus area: Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, Reliability, Security.
  • Cloud Journey Tracker: Self-guided tool for tracking your journey and navigate to right area of the framework.
  • Developer Velocity – Run an assessment to figure out Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score for your organization for efficiency.
  • Governance Benchmark – Gap analysis for current and future state of governance.
  • Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool – For measuring cloud migration readiness assessment.

#4 – Best practices categorized for each stage

The framework documentation is detailed and will highly recommend to read following areas:

Google Cloud Adoption Framework

Key highlights of the framework (Click here to read more on Google’s website):

#1 – Uses four themes for Cloud Maturity Assessment

Google recommends using four themes = Learn, Lead, Scale & Secure to develop cloud-ready organization. For each theme, they divide practices into three buckets – Tactical, Strategic & Transformational.

Google cloud themes
Image Source: https://services.google.com

#2 – Defines Epics based on Cloud Adoption Themes

For lean implementation, you can focus on the epics inside the four cloud adoption themes and for an enterprise, all eighteen epics can be explored, which are:

  1. Access management – ensuring authorization for people & services based on actions permitted
  2. Architecture – for best practices and recommendations for cloud architecture
  3. Behaviors – for building the right team and enculating the behavior required for successful cloud migration
  4. Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) – for automating changes to the system through a CI/CD process pipeline with minimal human intervention
  5. Cost control – for building cost consciousness for cloud resources at each layer including architects & developers and maximizing visibility into the costs incurred in near real-time
  6. Communication – for building the open culture and encourage team to learn from mistakes for future opportunities
  7. Data management – for understanding and managing data storage, data origination, data security, data access, etc.
  8. External experience – for accelerating cloud adoption by applying best practices and other organizational lessons learned since start
  9. Identity management – for authentication of users and services and establishing security guardrails
  10. Incident management – for alerting, triaging, and rectifying unplanned outage or degradation in timely manner
  11. Infrastructure as code – for automating infrastructure configuration and provisioning of cloud resources
  12. Instrumentation – for measuring cloud services health and logging events to ensure service-level objectives are measured and tracked
  13. Networking – for network connectivity and services protection and managing data flow across systems
  14. People operations- for defining the required organization structures with people’s role, skills, and performance alignment
  15. Resource management – for organizing, naming, and managing quotas of cloud resources in order to ensure a structured, consistent, and controlled environment
  16. Sponsorship – for executive support for cloud migration/adoption journey
  17. Teamwork – for team building with culture supporting cloud migration/adoption
  18. Upskilling – for preparing people for the right cloud skill-set
Google Cloud Adoption Process
Image Source: https://services.google.com

#3 – Approach on establishing Cloud Center of Excellence

Click here to read the whitepaper on building Cloud CoE.

#4 – Tools for Cloud Migration

  • Cloud Maturity Assessment – Click here to do access tool and plan & measure cloud migration approach

In summary, all three cloud adoption frameworks are very well documented and provides a detailed approach for cloud migration/adoption for any organization. Hence, there is no need to reinvent the wheel and develop your own framework – you can leverage any one of them based on your suitability.

References:

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