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MIGRATING INTO A CLOUD: INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing has been a hotly debated and discussed topic amongst IT
professionals and researchers both in the industry and in academia. There are intense
discussions on several blogs, in Web sites, and in several research efforts. This also
resulted in several entrepreneurial efforts to help leverage and migrate into the cloud
given the myriad issues, challenges, benefits, and limitations and lack of comprehensive
understanding of what cloud computing can do.
On the one hand, there were these large cloud computing IT vendors like Google,
Amazon, and Microsoft, who had started offering cloud computing services on what
seemed like a demonstration and trial basis though not explicitly mentioned. They were
charging users fees that in certain contexts demonstrated very attractive pricing models.
Most enterprises today are powered by captive data centers. In most large or small
enterprises today, IT is the backbone of their operations. Invariably for these large
enterprises, their data centers are distributed across various geographies.
They comprise systems and software that span several generations of products
sold by a variety of IT vendors. In order to meet varying loads, most of these data centers
are provisioned with capacity beyond the peak loads experienced.
Many data center management teams have been continuously innovating their
management practices and technologies.

Cloud computing turned attractive to them because they could pass on the
additional demand from their IT setups onto the cloud while paying only for the usage
and being unencumbered by the load of operations and management.

The Promise of the Cloud

1. The promise of the cloud both on the business front (the attractive cloudonomics)
and the technology front widely aided the CxOs to spawn out several non-mission
critical IT needs from the ambit of their captive traditional data centers to the
appropriate cloud service.
2. Invariably, these IT needs had some common features: They were typically Web-
oriented; they represented seasonal IT demands; they were amenable to parallel
batch processing; they were non-mission critical and therefore did not have high
security demands. They included scientific applications too [7]. Several small and
medium business enterprises, however, leveraged the cloud much beyond the
cautious user.
3. Many startups opened their IT departments exclusively using cloud services—
very successfully and with high ROI. Having observed these successes, several
large enterprises have started successfully running pilots for leveraging the cloud.
4. Many large enterprises run SAP to manage their operations. SAP itself is
experimenting with running its suite of products: SAP Business One as well as

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 SAP NetWeaver on Amazon cloud offerings.
5. Gartner, Forrester, and other industry research analysts predict that a substantially
significant percentage of the top enterprises in the world would have migrated
most of their IT needs to the cloud offerings by 2012, thereby demonstrating the
widespread impact and benefits from cloud computing. Indeed, the promise of the
cloud has been significant in its impact.

‘Pay per use’ – Lower Cost Barriers

On Demand Resources –Autoscaling
Cloudonomics Capex vs OPEX – No capital expenses (CAPEX) and only operational expenses OPEX.
SLA driven operations – Much Lower TCO
Attractive NFR support: Availability, Reliability

‘Infinite’ Elastic availability – Compute/Storage/Bandwidth

Automatic Usage Monitoring and Metering
Technology Jobs/ Tasks Virtualized and Transparently ‘Movable’
Integration and interoperability ‘support’ for hybrid ops
Transparently encapsulated & abstracted IT features.

The promise of the cloud computing services.

BROAD APPROACHES TO MIGRATING INTO THE CLOUD

Why Migrate:
There are economic and business reasons why an enterprise application can be
migrated into the cloud, and there are also several number of technological reasons.
Many of these efforts come up as initiatives in adoption of cloud technologies in
the enterprise, resulting in integration of enterprise applications running off the captive
data centers with the new ones that have been developed on the cloud.
At the core, migration of an application into the cloud can happen in one of
several ways:
1. Either the application is clean and independent.
2. Perhaps some degree of code needs to be modified and adapted or the design (and
therefore the code) needs to be first migrated into the cloud computing service
environment
3. Perhaps the migration results in the core architecture being migrated for a cloud
computing service setting, this resulting in a new architecture being developed,
along with the accompanying design and code implementation.
4. Perhaps while the application is migrated as is, it is the usage of the application
that needs to be migrated and therefore adapted and modified.
5. Migration can happen at five levels i.e.,
1. Application
2. Code
3. Design
4. Architecture
5. Usage

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With due simplification, the migration of an enterprise application is best captured by
the following:

1. Where P is the application before migration running in captive data center.

2. PC0 is the application part after migration into a (hybrid) cloud.
3. Pl0 is the part of application being run in the captive local data center.
4. P0OFC is the application part optimized for cloud.

Seven-Step Model of Migration into a Cloud

Step-1: Cloud migration assessments comprise assessments to understand the issues involved
in the specific case of migration at the application level or the code, the design, the
architecture, or usage levels. These assessments are about the cost of migration as well as
about the ROI that can be achieved in the case of production version.
Step-2: Isolating all systemic and environmental dependencies of the enterprise application
components within the captive data center.
Step-3: Generating the mapping constructs between what shall possibly remain in the local
captive data center and what goes onto the cloud.
Step-4: substantial part of the enterprise application needs to be rearchitected, redesigned, and
reimplemented on the cloud
Step-5: We leverage the intrinsic features of the cloud computing service to augment our
enterprise application in its own small ways.
Step-6: We validate and test the new form of the enterprise application with an extensive test
suite that comprises testing the components of the enterprise application on the cloud as well
Step-7: Test results could be positive or mixed. In the latter case, we iterate and optimize as
appropriate. After several such optimizing iterations, the migration is deemed successful

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 START
Assess

Optimize Isolate
END

The Iterative Seven Step

Migration Model
Test Map

Re-
Augment
architect

Enriching the ‘Integration as a Service’ Paradigm for the Cloud Era

1. The trend-setting cloud paradigm represents the cool conglomeration of a number of
proven and promising Web and enterprise technologies. Though the cloud idea is not
conceptually new, practically it has brought in myriad tectonic shifts for the whole
information and communication technology (ICT) industry.

2. The cloud concepts have progressively and perceptibly impacted the IT and business
domains on several critical aspects. The cloud computing has brought in series of
novelty-packed deployment, delivery, consumption and pricing models whereas the
service orientation prescribes as much simpler application design mechanism.

3. The noteworthy contribution of the much-discoursed and deliberated cloud computing

is the faster realization and proliferation of dynamic, converged, adaptive, on-demand,
and online compute infrastructures, which are the key requirement for the future IT.

4. The delightful distinctions here are that clouds guarantee most of the nonfunction
requirements (Quality of Service (QoS) attributes) such as availability, high
performance, on-demand scalability/elasticity, affordability, global-scale accessibility
and usability, energy efficiency etc.

5. Having understood the exceptional properties of cloud infrastructures (hereafter will

be described as just clouds), most of the global enterprises (small, medium and even
large) are steadily moving their IT offerings such as business services and
applications to clouds. This transition will facilitate a higher and deeper reach and
richness in application delivery and consumability.

6. Product vendors having found that the cloud style is a unique proposition are moving
their platforms, databases, and middleware to clouds. Cloud Infrastructure providers

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