A guide to cloud migration: perspectives of an application performance consultant

For many years, my pre-sales job focused on network and application performance, allowing me to meet and interact with companies in a wide variety of different sectors. Each time I worked with a new company, I got to experience exchange between our customers who shared much about their day-to-day jobs: from the industrialist who worked on CAD-CAM object models for their production factories, to retail chains that sell online or in brick and mortar stores.

Based on these conversations, we, my colleagues, partners, and I, would adapt our advice and solution proposals based on our understanding of our customers’ situations and our knowledge of IT and IT architectures.

Our focus is to create a solid link between their business and critical applications, proposing solutions for analyzing the performance of the business-critical applications made available to employees of the company—the applications these companies and their employees require for their day-to-day jobs and productivity.

Migrating business-critical apps to the cloud

My last, and ultimately most interesting experience, in this pre-sales role, was my visit to a maritime and road logistics company. The company was planning on hosting a new version of its customer relationship application in the cloud. This ERP was a web-based application for the web front-end, and the application and database servers were hosted on the company’s AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) instance.

Their network architecture was in various states of migration and was well on its way to becoming a hybrid cloud, with IT services still operating locally within their historical data centers and some of the data in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

To help them master the dependence between services and applications, we provided them with additional visibility into the performance of these flow exchanges, also analyzing the applications in AWS. This additional visibility came in the form of Skylight.

Network and application administrators at this maritime and road logistics company now use Skylight daily for troubleshooting incidents and for sharing dashboards for monitoring applications within their organization.

Adding a Skylight sensor to the cloud in the above central configuration to extend visibility and analysis capabilities is simple. From the AWS MarketPlace, a virtual Skylight sensor can be deployed on a T2 Medium instance. With Skylight’s special capabilities for requiring an extremely small amount of storage for full historical look-back with metadata, only 0.2% of the traffic data will be sent to the central storage.

Cost-effective monitoring in a distributed architecture

The latest version of Skylight enables us to add captures in a distributed architecture, without additional license costs (only the additional analysis capacities are taken into account centrally).

The new ERP application we helped them migrate was very simple to add to the Skylight application dictionary centrally. It is a new secure application whose HTTPS URL is known based on the TLS 1.3 protocol.

The configuration of the hosted ERP application deployed in AWS was built intuitively. The way in which the virtual front-end web server is built ensures the data transfer in TLS 1.3 is encrypted for a high level of security.

Leaving the SNI (Server Name Information) readable in the URL, which does not contain sensitive data, allowed us to analyze and reassemble enough metrics to track performance when users connect to the new architecture.

Monitoring performance of IaaS services

After having informed Skylight of the new IP subnets corresponding to the new servers in the AWS infrastructure where we placed the ERP app, we redirected the flows to be analyzed from the new ERP to the virtual interface of our sensor. This was done by configuring the VPC Traffic Mirroring available on this EC2 instance in the AWS Manager Console.

We quickly created dashboards that allowed us to follow the adoption by users of the new ERP application and compared the performance with the old version. We monitored simple information: the number of connections, the volumes, time-server, etc., knowing that if troubleshooting was needed, we had access to more metrics and details on errors up to Layer 7 (HTTP, SQL).

Dashboard of the ERP cloud migration: the before and after

A dashboard was also created for managers and line of business (LOB) leaders.

Project managers were also interested in simple indicators that characterized the adoption and usage of the new ERP application.

Dashboards for capacity planning

The number of connections, or the percentage of successful connections, volume, and bandwidth used, as well as the performance and the number of users per remote site, was used extensively for capacity planning.

Dashboards built with Skylight are easy to create and to modify. Your administrators or integrators can easily adapt them to your ad hoc needs.

To learn more about successfully migration to the cloud, and the importance of baselining performance of business-critical apps, before, during and after a migration, check out this guide for migrating to the cloud.