Your Journey to [Google] Cloud
Maintaining the right balance between speed, deadlines, and cost can be difficult during cloud migrations, especially if a comprehensive map isn’t established early on.
That said, by following four logical steps and understanding the key aspects of cloud adoption, businesses become far more likely to achieve an on-time and cost-effective cloud migration.
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About This eBook
As the cloud is becoming an integral part of core business operations all around the world, the pressure to successfully migrate to the cloud without hiccups is increasing. However, approximately half of all application migration projects go over budget and past the deadline. But at the same time, the other half don’t. What this tells us is that there are steps that ensuring a successful and cost-effective cloud migration isn’t natural but rather requires a series of proactive measures.
And the good news is that all of these steps are well established, tested, and there are dozens of resources that help businesses create their journey to the cloud, around these steps - this eBook is one such resource.
Key Takeaways:
- Take your time when choosing your first-mover workload/application.
- Leverage proven best practices throughout the cloud migration.
- Partner with a Google partner if your in-house team does not have the necessary technical expertise.
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Choosing The Right Starting Point
To avoid falling into pitfalls, you need to identify them first and after years of research, a few trends have emerged. For instance, a significant chunk of cloud projects makes a major mistake right at the beginning - picking the wrong applications/workloads to migrate. Starting off on the wrong foot means these companies are more likely to face issues later on.
Accept that the application or workload you need most on the cloud may not be the best one to begin your migration with. Ideally, your first-mover application shouldn’t be too complex (few or no dependencies, for instance), representative of the rest of your app portfolio, used often (to facilitate testing), and have moderate business value. Far too often businesses choose their biggest and most business-critical app as their first-mover advantage, often because:
- these are the most expensive on-prem apps
- stand most to gain from modernization
- on-prem backend simply cannot support the frontend anymore
However, the complexity and availability requirements result in delays and testing bottlenecks as developers struggle to balance experiments and live traffic. At the same time, costs continue to mount which adds administrative pressure as well.
Another easy pitfall to fall into is not sure of the cloud services fully. The Google Cloud ecosystem is massive, containing hundreds of services, dozens of which are designed specifically to make cloud migrations easier. Instead of taking the time to understand these services or working with a certified GCP partner, companies use their existing on-prem knowledge which results in additional costs and time, all while delivering a less optimized end-product.
Learning From Others
On top of all this, this eBook providers readers insights into real-world cloud migrations, taking a look at cloud migration projects at popular companies including Twitter, Lush, Cardinal Health, and more. Each case study looks at the major challenges faced as well as how the company managed to overcome them.
