Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Operations Explained E-Book

Mansura Habiba

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 329

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Most organizations are now either moving to the cloud through modernization or building their apps in the cloud. Hybrid cloud is one of the best approaches for cloud migration and the modernization journey for any enterprise. This is why, along with coding skills, developers need to know the big picture of cloud footprint and be aware of the integration models between apps in a hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. This book represents an overview of your end-to-end journey to the cloud. To be future agnostic, the journey starts with a hybrid cloud.
You'll gain an overall understanding of how to approach migration to the cloud using hybrid cloud technologies from IBM and Red Hat. Next, you’ll be able to explore the challenges, requirements (both functional and non-functional), and the process of app modernization for enterprises by analyzing various use cases. The book then provides you with insights into the different reference solutions for app modernization on the cloud, which will help you to learn how to design and implement patterns and best practices in your job.
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to successfully modernize applications and cloud infrastructure in hyperscaler public clouds such as IBM and hybrid clouds using Red Hat technologies as well as develop secure applications for cloud environments.

Leseprobe

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Operations Explained

Accelerate your application migration and modernization journey on the cloud with IBM and Red Hat

Mansura Habiba

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Operations Explained

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To my mom, Nazmun Nahar Khanam, and my dad, Abdul Wadud Khan, for being the best parents I could ever ask for. I owe them everything joyful and sound in my life. Also, to my brother, Nafiul Islam Khan (Earth), for being my best friend and counselor.

– Mansura Habiba

Foreword

Hybrid cloud is one of the most complex, exciting, and impactful areas to work in, helping organizations to redefine their business, migrate applications to new platforms, modernize workloads, adopt new consumption models, and eliminate waste. Open source, Kubernetes, and OpenShift have been at the forefront of this transition, allowing developers to build once and manage anywhere.

This book is the reference I wish I had when I was starting out in application modernization and migration! It’s packed with information and provides a systematic approach, starting with business understanding and requirements mapping, and then deep-diving all the way to low-level design and technical architecture. It does a fantastic job of explaining concepts, key decisions, alternatives, and the impact of every approach, and teaches you how to think like an architect!

I had the pleasure of meeting Mansura a few years ago at an innovation session hosted by the Academy of Technology, where she joined my patent team and impressed everyone with her knowledge, confidence, and expertise across the software development life cycle. I was thrilled to learn she wanted to join our team as a cloud solutions leader and use that experience to help clients adopt the cloud and design better solutions, speaking as someone who’s “been there and done it” and our go-to architect for complex solutions that require a DevSecOps mindset and a strong ability to lead.

Within a few years, I was thrilled to see Mansura author several courses and certifications, file multiple patents, obtain her Ph.D., and get appointed by the IBM Academy of Technology as a result of her giveback and leadership in the technical community, and take on a new challenge as a hybrid cloud platform architect, building a new offering from scratch. Prolific doesn’t even begin to describe it. To quote a colleague, “She’s everywhere – if you need help, just go to Mansura!”

Happy reading!

Mihai Criveti,

CTO Cloud Native and Red Hat Solutions,

STSM & RHCA II, IBM Consulting

Contributors

About the author

Mansura Habiba is a platform architect at the Hybrid Cloud Management Center of Competency at IBM. She has been working in IT, application development, application modernization and migration, and architecture design for over 15 years.

Mansura has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Maynooth University, Ireland. She is a certified solution architect for IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, a certified site reliability engineer and certified administrator for IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOPs, a certified professional IBM cloud developer, and a professional IBM Watson developer. Mansura can be found providing and sharing information on social media, at industry conferences, on her blog site, and on her YouTube channel.

About the reviewers

Rafflesia Khan works for IBM in Dublin as a software developer. She specializes in developing and testing full stack software applications. In addition, she is a part-time Ph.D. student at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She has a BSc and MSc in computer science and engineering from Khulna University, Bangladesh. Having a strong background in problem analysis, programming, designing, developing, debugging, and testing, she is committed, hardworking, creative, and proactive. She taught computer science at Khulna University for almost a year and participated in teaching at UL as a moderator. During the past 3 years, she has published some work and is currently engaged in ongoing research projects.

Dwarkanath Rao has over 21 years of experience as a quick learner and adopter of new technologies. He is a highly experienced and seasoned strategist, with an excellent track record in delivering highly complex large-scale enterprise infrastructure. He is a good customer-facing leader with great presentation skills. Guiding clients across Europe and Canada through hybrid cloud strategies, he collaborates with CTOs and CIOs in building trust and developing their cloud journey and strategy, focusing on cost savings and technical innovation to enhance their IT business operating models and deploying modernized application rollouts in a timely manner.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Moving to Hybrid Cloud

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Hybrid Cloud Modernization

An overview of the cloud migration problem

Understanding the fundamentals of the cloud and cloud migration

What is the cloud?

Different cloud models

What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration maturity model

Main drivers for cloud migration

Learning about the industry patterns for cloud migration

Re-Host

Re-Factor

Re-Platform

Replace

Re-Architect

Relocate

Retain

Retire

Re-Innovate

Developing a roadmap for successful cloud migration and modernization

Discovery

Data collection

Analyze

Planning

Operation

Governance

Learn

Discovering the myths in cloud migration

Myth – re-hosting a workload without preparing for the cloud

Myth – relocating a workload without a cloud-native design

Myth – limited knowledge about cloud computing

Myth – cloud migration without an objective

Myth – limited or no assessment for cloud migration planning

Myth – inefficient assessment for cloud migration

Myth – cloud migration versus cloud modernization

Summary

Chapter 2: Understanding Cloud Modernization and and Innovation Fundamentals

Understanding the fundamentals of modernization

What is application modernization?

The challenges of application modernization

Drivers for application modernization

Modernization approach

Analyzing modernization preparation reports

Assessing the modernization maturity level

Hybrid and multi-cloud

What is a hybrid cloud?

What is multi-cloud?

Understanding a business’s mindset for cloud adoption

Business benefits

Understanding a solution architect’s mindset for cloud adoption

Getting familiar with a developer’s mindset for cloud adoption

Summary

Chapter 3: xploring Best Practices for the Cloud Journey

Exploring fundamental practices for the cloud journey

Planning and assessing for modernization with IBM tools

Preparation

IBM cloud migration service

IBM Garage Method for Cloud

Functional and non-functional requirements analysis

Functional requirements

Non-functional requirements

Landing zone as a service

Common management

Account onboarding

Identity and access control management

Subscription and billing management

Platform design and build

Network setup

Observability

Characteristics of the landing zone

Landing zone as a service

Sample landing zone for the use case

Summary

Further reading

Part 2: Cloud-Native Methods, Practices, and Technology

Chapter 4: Developing Applications in a Cloud Native Way

The Twelve-Factor method

Code base

Dependencies 

Configuration

Backing services

The build stage and run stage

Process

Port binding

Concurrency 

Dev/prod parity 

Disposability

Optimization

Logging

Administration process

Observability

Security by design

Blue/green test

Interoperability

Resiliency by design

Telemetry

IBM Design Thinking

Principles of IBM Design Thinking

IBM Design Thinking keys

Loop

The IBM Garage application development method

Summary

References

Chapter 5: Exploring Application Modernization Essentials

Planning for application modernization

Business value and roadmap

Deep discovery and design

Building a landing zone and migration

Modernization on the cloud

Deployment and delivery

Assessment and requirement analysis

A reference solution for application modernization

Functional requirements

Non-functional requirements

Solution components

Reference architecture

Use cases for application modernization

Migrating a legacy application to the platform

Modernization with the Re-Architect migration pattern

Modernization of the JBoss application using an extension

Modernization of a Java application

Summary

Further reading

Part 3: Elements of Embedded Linux

Chapter 6: Designing and Implementing Cloud Storage Services

Understanding the requirements of storage and database modernization

Block storage

File storage

Cloud object storage

Container storage

Database services

Designing a modern data insight solution

Modernize legacy data sources

Secure network connectivity

Develop continuous observability

User access control management

Develop interoperability or a data collection layer

Automating data preparation and the secure storage layer

Developing a data analysis layer with AI

Developing data infusion and a visualization layer

Modernization of a data hub platform with IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Functional requirements for data hub modernization

Architecture diagram

Architecture decisions for a data platform only

Designing a backup solution for resilient storage and database

The functional requirements for a backup and restore solution

Exploring a big data analytics solution for the healthcare industry

What needs to be backed up

The backup solution for the containerized platform

The backup solution for all VM instances with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus

The backup solution for all files with IBM Spectrum Scale

Summary

Further reading

Chapter 7: Designing and Implementing Networking in Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Planning an efficient network solution

Functional requirements

Non-functional requirements

Exploring a reference network solution

Network virtualization

Redundancy and distribution

Enterprise connectivity

Network segmentation

Load balancing

DNS service

Network protection

Architecture decisions

Exploring IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation

Implementing edge computing with IBM Cloud Satellite

Summary

Further reading

Chapter 8: Understanding Security in Action

Planning for the adoption of security as a culture

Solution design – security in action

Change management and planning

Secure landing zone

System testing, maintenance, and monitoring

Authentication process

Violations

Responsibilities

Threat modeling for applications and cloud services

Vulnerability management

Exploring the reference security architecture

Identity and access management

Security intelligence and Operation Center (SOC)

Data security

Container security

Infrastructure security

Endpoint protection

Getting familiar with Cloud Pak for Security as a Service on IBM Cloud

How does it work?

Benefits

Understanding continuous security review readiness

Authentication and access management

Secrets management

Least-privilege operation

Compute isolation

Network isolation

Encryption at rest and secure deletion

Logging and non-repudiation

Injection prevention

Secure development practices

Updates and secure configuration

Business continuity planning (BCP)

Data classification

Known issues

Central information security officer

Summary

Further reading

Chapter 9: Designing a Resilient Platform for Cloud Migration

Planning to build a resilient platform

Workload severity

RPO

RTO

Implementing HA

Benefits of HA

Requirements for designing for HA

Designing HA

Implementing Always On

Implementing reliability

Redundant resources

Retrying until N times

Using sidecars

Auto-scaling for growth

Waterfall

Implementing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DR services

Disaster transparency with chaos engineering

Implementing cyber resilience

Implementing observability and governance

Dashboard

Summary

Further reading

Chapter 10: Managing Operations in Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Understanding the pillars of SRE

Leadership and culture

Work sharing

Monitoring

SLOs and SLIs

Error budget

Toil reduction

Incident management

Automation

Exploring the platform engineering service

Understanding KPIs for the platform service

Understanding FinOps

FinOps reference architecture

Understanding reference architectures for MLOPs

Project governance

Understanding the IBM reference architecture for incident management

Understanding the IBM reference architecture for problem management

Fishbone diagrams

Keppner-Tregoe

5 whys

The cloud service management reference architecture

Measuring ORRs 

Summary

Further reading

Appendix A –Application Modernization and Migration Checklist

Identifying the key roles

Discovery and learning

Determining the KPIs

Prioritization and a planning roadmap

Designing and building MVPs or Waves

Speed modernization with tools and an industry accelerator

Operation at scale

Summary

Further reading

Why subscribe?

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Operations Explained discusses the best practices for application migration and modernization using various products and technologies from IBM and Red Hat. This book starts by explaining the fundamental concepts of application migration and modernization in terms of cloud journey strategies for organizations to help them understand the underlying aspects and drivers of cloud adoption and how they can achieve the best result out of it. The book then proceeds to explain different components such as compute, storage, networking, security, and operations to establish those fundamental concepts with best practices and real-world use cases from different industries.

Who this book is for

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Operations Explained is for anyone who develops applications, designs cloud platform architectures, leads application modernization and migration programs, and drives decisions for application modernization and migration programs from business and financial aspects. Familiarity with the cloud is not mandatory. If someone has just heard about the cloud and wants to explore business use cases, best practices, and methods for application modernization and migration to the cloud, this book is a perfect fit for them.

What this book covers

This book is broken into three sections. Part 1 covers the fundamental concepts of application migration and modernization with innovation as well as best practices for cloud adoption.

Chapter 1, An Introduction to Hybrid Cloud Modernization, starts by introducing the cloud. It gives different popular strategies for cloud migration used in industries. This chapter also focuses on the fundamental concept of cloud migration along with recent trends and challenges by exploring real-life industry use cases. It also helps to explain the characteristics of a successful roadmap for an application migration program. Finally, this chapter sheds some light on different cloud concepts and our understanding of the cloud.

Chapter 2, Understanding Cloud Modernization and and Innovation Fundamentals, explains fundamental concepts for successful application modernization driven by innovation. Modernization is a complex process that requires extensive analysis of the strategies and proper planning. This chapter describes the dos and don’ts to select the right path for modernization. It also explores different cultural and mindset aspects of different stakeholders such as developers and solution architects.

Chapter 3, Exploring Best Practices for the Cloud Journey, explores best practices to overcome different challenges of cloud transformation. It also gives an overview of different IBM products and services that can help you migrate to the cloud successfully and enhance the innovativeness of modernization. This chapter establishes the basic set of functional as well as non-functional requirements that cloud adoption programs will explore to be successful.

Part 2 explores cloud-native methods, practices, and technologies. Each chapter explains different cloud-native development methodologies and technologies that can enhance the efficiency of application modernization.

Chapter 4, Developing Applications in a Cloud Native Way, dives into the world of development and explains different methodologies and practices for cloud-native development so that you can differentiate different technology for implementations of different types of applications. This chapter discusses the IBM Design Thinking and IBM Garage methodologies along with the Twelve-Factor methodology for application modernization in detail.

Chapter 5, Exploring Application Modernization Essentials, focuses on the fundamental requirements and challenges of application modernization. It also gives an overview of the end-to-end journey of application modernization, starting from planning to implementation.

Part 3 focuses exclusively on the cloud infrastructure to set up a platform in the cloud for organizations. The main goal of this section is to get you familiar with raw cloud infrastructure, storage, networks, security, resiliency, and continuous operations to take care of all these cloud computing resources to establish a successful platform for application migration and modernization using IBM and Red Hat products and technologies.

Chapter 5, Designing and Implementing Cloud Storage Services, looks in depth at the characteristics of cloud data storage to understand its requirements and design. It also presents a real-world use case scenario explaining how to develop a modern AI and data insights solution or modern big data hub solution using IBM and Red Hat products and technologies. It moves on to explain the architecture design details for data storage backup solutions for applications deployed on the cloud using real-world industry examples.

Chapter 5, Designing and Implementing Networking in Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, looks at a real-world reference solution for modern network architecture for cloud workloads. Using a real-world use case, this chapter explains the main challenges and requirements of efficient network communication. It also explains how IBM Cloud Pak products can improve the efficiency of network operations.

Chapter 8, Understanding Security in Action, looks in depth at the implementation of security, regulations, and compliance for cloud services and resources. This chapter describes challenges, practices, and best practices for security in cloud modernization. It also gives an overview of different IBM products to design a secure platform.

Chapter 9, Designing a Resilient Platform for Cloud Migration, focuses on resiliency to implement reliability, high availability, disaster recovery, Always-On, cyber security, and other resiliency patterns for the raw infrastructure components.

Chapter 10, Managing Operations in Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, describes the challenges, requirements, solutions, methods, and best practices of operation management. It also explains IBM reference architecture for different operation and management solutions.

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Part 1: Moving to Hybrid Cloud

This first part discusses cloud adoption strategies, functional and non-functional requirements for modernization, along with impacts and fundamentals. Relevant reference solutions will be used to provide real-world use cases. The main objective of Part 1 is to help you understand the fundamentals of application modernization and migration and get familiar with best practices to migrate to the cloud. This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

Chapter 1, An Introduction to Hybrid Cloud ModernizationChapter 2, Understanding Cloud Modernization and and Innovation FundamentalsChapter 3, Exploring Best Practices for the Cloud Journey

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Hybrid Cloud Modernization

Moving from on-premises to the cloud is a very challenging task. Many enterprises are evaluating the process of cloud migration. This chapter will take a real-world scenario of an organization in the retail industry under cloud migration and look at its impact on the business. For simplicity, we will introduce the use case of Landorous. We will also get familiar with popular cloud migration patterns in different industries and evaluate them for Landorous to understand the best practice for a cloud migration strategy adoption. The Landorous case introduces cloud migration’s business and technical challenges and pain points. Later in this chapter, we will evaluate a suitable roadmap for cloud migration to overcome these challenges.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

An overview of the cloud migration problem Understanding the fundamentals of the cloud and cloud migrationLearning about the industry patterns for cloud migration Developing a roadmap for successful cloud migration and modernizationDiscovering the myths in cloud migration

An overview of the cloud migration problem

This section describes the functional/business requirements for the Landorous use case, as follows:

We will discuss the challenges of the Landorous use case. As one of the world’s largest retail companies, this organization has many on-premises-based workloads. The core pain point for Landorous is that the maintenance outage every week causes a loss of millions, affecting the company’s cash flow. In addition, the maintenance outage is a painful process and time consuming. For 8 hours of maintenance outage each week, they lose approximately 1.5 million USD in revenue. The lead developer and teams need to work on weekends for the maintenance outage. Due to manual and redundant activities, several problems arise during the maintenance outage window every week. The company has outsourced some of its development work to third-party organizations, which costs a lot.The business teams want to move fast and scale up. However, with the current infrastructure, this is very tough. Therefore, they have assessed that a simple web application integration to their integration platform takes 2 and a half months, excluding the functionality development work. Figure 1.1 shows the workload of the current ecosystem:

Figure 1.1 – The current workload in data centers

In addition, the core integration platform connects multiple systems that are situated either on-premises or on other public clouds, as shown in the following system context diagram:

Figure 1.2 – The system context diagram

The company wants to create new business opportunities as well as new departments. However, the current infrastructure needs a considerable investment for additional hardware and software. They also need extra management and support for new infrastructure in their on-premises data center. In addition, they are constantly struggling to find skills, and manual management is not helping them at all.Some simple workflows – for example, validating the age of a customer for alcohol or validating an e-prescription for medicine – are manual, which causes a delay in service execution. The customer has expressed their dissatisfaction with that. The on-premises data warehouse requires an extreme level of governance, security, optimization, and orchestration for maintenance. All those activities are primarily manual and dependent on a database administrator group.Applications have been developed over decades based on legacy technology. There is a lack of documentation and automation for deployment. There is a profound link between application data and its enterprise complexities. Any simple change to the application requires an extreme level of effort and investment. Therefore, strangling the Matrix from Hell in monolithic applications is very challenging.A legacy workload inherits complex integration models with non-standard data models, which imposes challenges. For example, let’s assume that several COBOL applications have been running without support for the last year due to a lack of skills and expertise. The customer wants to improve service quality as well as customer satisfaction. Therefore, they intend to use artificial intelligence (AI) to use modern technology, such as process mining, automated workflow, and business insight. However, setting up modern technology in their on-premises data center is very expensive, and the time to market is exponentially high.

As shown in Figure 1.1, the organization has a different kind of workload in its existing data center. The applications for the customer are too many, as shown in Figure 1.3:

Figure 1.3 – A typical hairball infrastructure for on-premises monolithic applications and integrated workloads

The company sets some goals for improvement, as follows:

Decrease outages, reduce painful processes, and allow teams to move fast and scale.Increase cash flow with automation and reduce cost for infrastructure buildings and management.Validate a business case that will provide immediate and long-term net worth due to cloud transformation.

The company started a program to explore different business cases to achieve these goals, as follows:

Add more workforce and increase skills and benefits for the existing workforce.Add an incentive for an additional working hour.Refresh technology and add new components to the existing data center.Cloud migration.

To help this organization migrate their workload to the cloud and get the maximum benefits from the program, we need to understand the requirements, business value proposition, current workload, main challenges, and other dependencies. We also need to define the correct roadmap for their cloud migration.

Let’s now understand the basics of cloud transformation, different industry strategies, and their potential benefits, which will help us define the roadmap for the organization.

Understanding the fundamentals of the cloud and cloud migration

There are many benefits of cloud migration and modernization, such as the diversity and agility of IT operations and providing a cost-effective secured platform and a ready-to-run platform for AI innovation. As a result, major cloud providers continuously improve their offerings by adding services, securing platforms, efficiently managing the infrastructure, and providing competitive advantages in many areas.

However, it is still essential to determine the right cloud migration solution for organizations. To design the right solution, we need to understand the core concept of cloud migrations. This section will cover cloud computing, explore the different cloud models, and explain what a cloud migration is.

What is the cloud?

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the cloud can be defined as follows:

A model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, such as networks, servers, storage, applications, and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Therefore, a hosted data center is not cloud-based according to NIST. A hosted data center is a private cloud in the information technology (IT) industry. As a result, we will also consider the recent trends and terminology in the IT industry. Most cloud migration projects can be put into the following two categories:

Cloud to cloudOn-premises to cloud

In this book, we will mainly focus on on-premises to cloud migration projects.

Different cloud models

Cloud models can be primarily of two kinds – delivery models and service models. Figure 1.4 shows the model classification for the cloud:

Figure 1.4 – Two kinds of cloud models

In the following sections, we will look at each of these models in detail.

Delivery model

In addition to the public cloud, there are two other delivery models, known as the private cloud and hybrid cloud, as depicted in Figure 1.4.

Private cloud

Different sources define the private cloud with slightly different definitions. For example, this is how IBM Cloud Learn defines it:

Private cloud is a cloud computing environment dedicated to a single customer. It combines many of the benefits of cloud computing with the security and control of on-premises IT infrastructure.

In Preparing for Your Migration to the Cloud by Steve Francis, this is how it is defined:

Private cloud is simply a cloud that you build and operate yourself.

The core characteristics of a private cloud are as follows:

It is dedicated exclusively to a single tenant.Security hardening rules and policies regulate it.It can be hosted on-premises in an organization’s data center or on a managed data center of the cloud provider.It is still able to have all the benefits of a cloud-native architecture.

Recently, among these three different delivery models, the hybrid cloud model is becoming very popular. The following section will discuss the different aspects of the hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud

Often, organizations cannot move all the workload to the public cloud due to migration costs, regulations, cloud service availability, and other reasons. As a result, these organizations often end up with cloud workloads and on-premises workloads in a hybrid cloud model. Another main reason for hybrid cloud is portability. Organizations often want to avoid cloud provider lock-in and deploy their workload so that applications and services can be easily decoupled from an underlying cloud provider workload. In addition, multiple cloud adoption is becoming a viral strategy. According to a 2017 survey by Cloudify, more than 51% of organizations have workloads in multiple clouds.

It is essential to select a suitable delivery model for cloud migration. Figure 1.5 shows a decision tree for the cloud delivery model:

Figure 1.5 – A decision tree for the cloud delivery model selection

If migrating the workload to the cloud is not possible due to some dependency and the result of return on investment (ROI) analysis, hybrid cloud can be a suitable option that allows organizations to continue innovation and modernization via the cloud without interrupting the legacy workload deployed on the on-premises data center.

The next step for cloud modernization readiness is to select a service model. There are multiple types of service models used in the industry. Often, a combination of multiple service models is used for cloud modernization and migration projects to optimize the benefit. At the same time, one dedicated service model may not be the correct answer for different workloads. This section discusses the different types of service models and their benefits and limitations.

Service model

Figure 1.6 shows the primary service models for the cloud. However, in addition to the primary services, two services, the business support service (BSS) and operation support service (OSS), are becoming popular. Therefore, the three service models can be described as follows:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides companies with computing resources, including servers, networking, storage, and data center space, on a pay-per-use basis. The developers hide the low-level details, and they can focus on innovation.Platform as a service (PaaS) provides a cloud-based environment with computing, storage, network, and other capabilities to support the complete life cycle of implementation, deployment, and delivery of applications, without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware software, provisioning, and hosting.Software as a service (SaaS), or cloud-based applications, run on distant computers “in the cloud” owned and operated by cloud providers. The user can access them from their computers through the internet and a web browser.Business support as a service (BSaaS) provides support for continuous business insights. BSaaS is an advisory service. This service plans for workload migration to the cloud and continues the business as usual.Operation as a service (OpsaaS): Workloads on the cloud need continuous management through cloud operations, data operations, and security operations. Often, these operations are provided as a service to organizations. The cloud operation model is essential to continue operations to ensure high availability (HA), business continuity, resiliency, security, and DevOps. OpsaaS provides continuous support for different cloud operations.

Figure 1.6 – Service models

Understanding the service model and delivery model is essential. However, the application migration and modernization project are more significant than selecting the exemplary service and delivery models. Several different drivers, such as the current workload, application, user experience, complexity of the infrastructure, and business use cases, drive the cloud migration and modernization project in multiple phases. This book will discuss the different aspects of cloud migration and modernization. Let’s start by getting familiar with the definition of cloud migration.

What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration refers to when enterprises move some or all of their data center workloads and capabilities to a cloud-based infrastructure to enable cloud readiness. Cloud readiness is the capabilities provided by enterprises, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 1.7 – Cloud readiness

Once we define cloud readiness, it will help us classify existing workloads and determine the cloud migration maturity model. In the following section, we will learn about different cloud migration and maturity models.

Cloud migration maturity model

The cloud migration maturity model is simply a classification of a workload to determine the priority and feasibility of a workload for the cloud migration process. It’s essential to classify current or as-is workloads based on their characteristics and cloud computing defined by NIST.

We can classify different workloads into four categories of current or as-is infrastructure, based on their score of cloud readiness.

Non-cloud

Not all legacy workloads deployed on-premises can be moved to the cloud. If on-premises workloads do not show any cloud-readiness characteristics, as shown in Figure 1.7, they cannot be migrated to the cloud. In addition, modernizing a legacy workload can be very expensive. If there is no sufficient business value for modernizing or migrating a legacy workload, organizations may keep them in their current state. These workloads cannot be migrated to the cloud efficiently. Therefore, they need to remain on-premises or be listed for either a Retain, Retire or Replace migration strategy – three things we will touch on later in this chapter.

Cloud-friendly

Cloud-friendly workloads are not primarily designed with cloud-ready architecture. However, they can be changed or refactored to achieve cloud-ready architecture. Workloads that can be decoupled from the underlying compute, storage, and network are especially suitable candidates for cloud-friendly workloads. They need a significant redesign, but it is possible to measure the efficiency of the migration process, and the business impact can be clearly defined. These workloads are suitable candidates for Re-Architect and Re-Innovate migration strategies, which we will touch on later.

Cloud-ready

If on-premises workloads have a cloud-ready architecture with observability, fault tolerance, interoperability, portability, security, and scalability, they are ready for cloud migration. As a result, these workloads are suitable candidates for Re-Host and Re-Factor migration strategies.

Cloud-native

Cloud-native applications are implemented with microservice architecture to implement most of the design principles of cloud-ready characteristics. Hence, these workloads are suitable candidates for Re-Host and Re-Platform migration strategies.

Main drivers for cloud migration

The main drivers for cloud migration can be financial, business strategy, agility for IT operations, and innovation. Here are some critical technical drivers for cloud migration:

Most applications in a legacy environment suffer from the Matrix from Hell, which is the challenge of decoupling applications and packaging them in a format to run on the cloud regardless of language, framework, and other dependencies. If the current applications are containerized, this problem is already solved, and moving those applications to the cloud is easier. Organizations have been developing workloads for a long time, and decades of application evolution with legacy application development patterns often create the Matrix from Hell, as shown in Figure 1.8. Many monolithic applications are interconnected in such a complex way that changing them, such as adding new features and optimizing existing features, becomes very challenging. The Matrix from Hell makes the maintenance of applications extremely difficult. Even making a simple change in the application takes lots of effort – this increases the CPU, memory, and storage consumption of the application. It is difficult to access data in legacy applications. Therefore, introducing modern technology for data analysis is very challenging.Enterprises need to significantly reduce their time to market to survive amid extreme competitiveness. Therefore, there is a need to shift management for the computing, storage, platform, and network to the service provider so that developers can focus on innovation, ultimately reducing the time to market.

Figure 1.8 – The Matrix from Hell for a simple Node.js application

Enterprises struggle to keep up with modern technology. This is not only due to a skills crisis but also because modern technology requires a specific platform setup. However, on the cloud, they are available as IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. It is also straightforward to integrate with modern technology. For example, provisioning a blockchain platform on the IBM public cloud only takes a few minutes. With the IBM-managed Red Hat OpenShift platform, IBM takes responsibility for compute, storage, and network management and support. Therefore, developers are not burdened with maintenance, which is time consuming, and can focus on innovation.Operation cost is very high, and there are capacity limitations in an on-premises data center.Skill is limited to modern technology. Therefore, often, industries fail to scale along with demand due to a lack of skills and expertise.Compatibility with regulations and compliance often requires additional cost and effort.A constrained business process imposes additional challenges.Defining business uses is essential to driving a successful cloud migration project. In addition, these business use cases also help to define different key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the cloud migration projects.

Before starting the journey to the cloud, we need to prepare and assess the cloud migration projects in the next section. Different industries follow different patterns for migrating a workload from on-premises to the cloud.

Learning about the industry patterns for cloud migration

Cloud migration moves workloads from a source environment to a target environment. In most cases, the source environment is an on-premises data center, and the target environment is the cloud. This section will present the nine most used cloud migration patterns, known as the nine Rs.

Re-Host

Enterprises use the Re-Host strategy to move workloads (applications, databases, and so on) from an on-premises server to a virtual machine (VM) in the cloud without making significant changes. Re-Host is an overall strategy and is also known as lift and shift. Although this strategy makes the cloud migration process faster and cheaper, it prevents enterprises from benefiting from cloud readiness and can increase management costs even more than on-premises. Furthermore, as with other patterns, Re-Host is not always suitable for every type of workload migration to the cloud. Table 1.1 shows the benefits and limitations of a Re-Host strategy to move workloads:

Table 1.1 – The benefits and limitations of the Re-Host pattern

Re-Factor

This approach introduces cloud readiness to applications and databases to scale on demand and adopt cloud readiness features such as security, speed, and resilience. According to Gartner, the Re-Factor pattern restructures and optimizes existing code without changing its functional and non-functional behavior to remove technical debt, which later needs to be refactored. This strategy requires changing the code of existing applications, redesigning the integration between components, or replacing existing components with modern alternatives. For example, significant code needs to be changed to modernize a monolithic application to a set of microservice applications or replace a SQL database with a NoSQL database.

Figure 1.9 shows the simplified list of activities to migrate a workload from on-premises to the cloud using the Re-Factor migration pattern. Here is a list of activities to transform an as-is platform into a to-be platform:

Containerize existing monolithic applications.Automate processes for data discovery, data and application dependency mapping, data movement, and synchronization.Replace the on-premises database with an appropriate database as a service (DBaaS), based on the data characteristics.Configure the application.Establish a DevOps pipeline.

Figure 1.9 – The activities to migrate a workload using the Re-Factor pattern

The benefits and challenges of the Re-Factor migration strategy are described in Table 1.2:

Table 1.2 – The pros and cons of the Re-Factor cloud migration strategy pattern

Re-Platform

Re-Platform is the middle ground between Re-Host and Re-Factor. Instead of moving a large set of workloads, only a few are moved to the cloud to take advantage of it. So, for example, instead of using an on-premises-hosted Db2 warehouse, which is very difficult to manage, enterprises can use the IBM Db2 WareHouse as a service