Journey to the cloud platforms is full of rough weather for most organizations. In most cases, the plan to migrate to the cloud is underprepared resulting in difficulties faced by the teams at a later phase of migration. This also results in the common misconceptions related to the cloud where the organizations find cloud computing to be significantly different and difficult when compared to the on-premises infrastructure. These can be avoided by looking at the common fallacies and mistakes made by the organizations. When an organization decides to move to the cloud platform, the transition usually requires two types of changes.
Culture of application development, delivery, and operations: The organizations need to become lean and thin with scrum teams and 2-pizza teams and adopt the Agile methodology.
Adoption of the new technology stack: This involves the adoption of the latest technology platforms, services, and architecture patterns that can smoothly work on the cloud platforms.
The plan for the migration to the cloud infrastructure must include the following key aspects to make it smooth and easy.
Governance body
Similar to enterprise architecture initiatives, cloud migration also requires the setting up of a governance body that can take key decisions related to cloud migration. The governance body takes the responsibility of end-to-end completion of the migration process, including rearchitecting of the existing on-premises solutions, identification of the new concerns and risks on the cloud, implementation of the new components, and many more. It generally consists of a team of Enterprise Architects from the domain of business, data, application, and technology.
Rearchitecting of Solution
The existing solution needs to be rearchitected to become capable of using the cloud services. A monolith may not be able to scale horizontally and needs to be decomposed into microservices. Likewise, the security standards of a legacy solution may be more suited for a physically isolated environment, but in the case of the cloud, their security needs to be enhanced with the help of vulnerability assessments and penetration tests.
Landing Zone
A landing zone is the de-facto first step towards the cloud. It consists of an environment that is configured at a small to resemble the security design, isolation design, multi-tenancy, monitoring and logging, central control, and many such concerns of the actual user application. It gives a first-hand feel about the final application deployment and allows the DevOps teams to standardize the security baselines and other standards. It focuses on every element such as naming conventions, policy compliances, and authorized accesses.
