The 3 M’s for cloud migration performance

Magnify, migrate, and monitor

In December, Accedian was at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IOCS) Conference in Las Vegas. We presented on the performance visibility challenges and opportunities in cloud migration to a ravenous crowd not wanting to be another one of the below statistics.

Nearly 10 years ago already, Gartner defined the strategy for cloud migration around 5 different options, generally known in the industry as the ‘5 Rs’:

1. Rehost: Also known as “lift and shift”, this implies that you just move your workloads as-is on to cloud virtual machines (VMs) from VMs in your data center.
2. Refactor: Involves using cloud PaaS platforms and adopting for those, but generally keeping the implementation languages and frameworks the same from the original deployment.
3. Revise: Involves modernizing the codebase for cloud platforms and adopting the application to cloud or microservices platforms.
4. Rebuild: Involves completely rebuilding the application from the ground up to take advantage of a cloud environment.
5. Replace: Retiring an in-house application completely and replacing it with a commercially-available cloud service.

A lot of ink has been spilt discussing the pros and cons of each of these cloud migration strategies. At Accedian, we’ve helped many customers in their journey to the cloud, and no matter which strategy you choose, you’re going to go through a generally common set of steps in your cloud migration journey:

Having performance visibility is really critical at three steps of the journey: Magnify, Migrate and Monitor. We call these the Accedian Three Ms of Cloud Migration:

Let’s look at each step in a bit more detail.

Magnify: Magnifying involves creating a baseline of performance of your current application. Understanding customer usage patterns, bandwidth consumption, current performance, level of complexity, distribution and criticality.

Migrate: During migration you want to be able to understand the performance of the cloud application relative to your baseline. You can have confidence during customer ramp up and transition to the cloud platform and be proactive in addressing any performance issues.

Monitor: After the migration phase is over, you want to be able to continue to monitor the performance of the cloud application and be proactive in addressing performance issues. Isolate cloud provider versus network versus application issues, monitor application SLAs, understand the impact of cloud technology changes and understand the drivers of your cloud hosting costs.

In the end, a big part of the risk around any transformation project is around balancing risks and cost. You can better address both of these by magnifying application performance and resource utilization baselines up front, by being able to address them as they occur during migration and also being able to monitor performance in the cloud after migration.

By leveraging the Accedian 3 Ms for cloud migration performance, you can ensure that you are proactively addressing application performance before, during and after your cloud migration process – no matter which of the Gartner 5 Rs you choose for your strategy.

And speaking of cost—we know that money matters! See why our Accedian Skylight has the lowest TCO on the market for cloud and network performance monitoring. Hint: it’s all in the metadata.