Whether you’re considering moving to the cloud or are already there and about to embark on a modernisation programme, Dan Jones shares his thoughts and top 5 tips to get you heading in the right direction.
Projects like these typically require financial investment that will only pay back a year or two down the line and may well require a temporary pause on other company initiatives . So bearing this in mind, here are some of my thoughts to get your project moving as quickly as possible.
Discovery
Gather a comprehensive list of all known applications to get a feel of the scope, then add 10% for the unknowns. If you can also obtain any related costs at an application or business level, this will help with decision making later on.
Developer Feedback
Developer FeedbackSpeak to development teams to better understand their applications and get their feedback on how to approach the project. Find out what’s horribly complex, what’s costing the most and what is perhaps already scheduled to be retired within the project timeline.
“Just start!”
“Just start!”Don’t spend too much time in the project planning phase, there’s so much you don’t know yet, so adopt an agile approach and start simple, in a safe-to-fail way, with light-weight processes tailored to the initial scope of the project (call it a ‘pilot phase’), build momentum and then mature the processes and controls as you proceed.
The elephant in the room
The elephant in the roomEvery company has one, it will have a quirky name, have been around for years and only two or three people will know how it works – it will be fragile and if it goes down, for even a minute, the CEO will be on your back! Don’t worry, everyone you speak with will bring this up!
My Top Five Tips
My Top Five TipsThe following are my top 5 suggestions to get your app migration project underway, it’s not an exhaustive list (e.g. I haven’t delved into network routing or database architecture) and the steps might not be right for you, so adapt and tailor to your own specific needs.
- Core Services – anything that is in the transactional path of what the company does or sells, identify it and prioritise it. Bonus points if you get C-suite to support a company-wide target completion date for this phase.
- Heavy hitters – anything running on a large and costly infra footprint, start to modernise it early in the process. This might be a triple-jump migration (i.e. a hop, a skip and a final jump) such as physical to VMs > to auto-scaling VMs > to Kubernetes – also refer back to ‘speak to your Devs for advice’.
- Watch out for network costs – Moving applications from A to B (e.g. IaaS to Kubernetes, or DC to Cloud) often involves moving from network A to Network B. Understand this and coordinate migrations to minimise egress traffic costs which can be significant if not properly managed (i.e. try to bundle and move the chatty-apps together).
- Cost Management – Appoint someone to be in charge of Cost Management (tagging resources, structuring spend by LOB), Reporting and Cost Optimisation initiatives. This role will pay for itself several times over within the project lifespan.
- Ask nicely, be humble, celebrate success – You’re asking a lot of people to do a lot of extra work that – in the most – doesn’t directly benefit the role they were hired to do, so be polite, ask nicely, show empathy, celebrate each win and make it personal to the people involved.
These are just a few of my thoughts, I hope you find them useful, what would you add to the list?
Feel free to hit me up for a coffee if you have a similar project you want to discuss or just want to bounce some ideas around.
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