Pros & Cons of Cloud Migration vs. Cloud Native

Warm wishes, in this aNewLeaf #6 (a New Learning from this week) let’s discuss about the pros and cons of the cloud migration vs. cloud native. It’s very clear for any digital transformation initiatives in the organization, they must includes the cloud computing technology. But we might have questions like do we really need to migrate the existing infrastructure and applications or we need to rebuild in the cloud. Come let’s get in to and understand the difference with regards to approach, process and costs. This discussion is all about non-technical and inspired from the book Cloud Migration vs. Cloud Native by Justin Garrison.

Cloud Migration:

This approach of cloud migration is very common for getting our existing infrastructure and application into a cloud providers, to name few Azure, GCP, AWS. It involves very less impact of changes to the existing systems by creating the same resources, applications, and architecture in the cloud provider platform. Even here we have few challenges like which don’t map one to one; things like network topologies, access management, and security.

This could be done by three possible ways;

1) Convert the machine or virtual machine images from on-premises data centers to the cloud providers environment

2) Migrating VMs like database management or storage in to the cloud providers environment

3) Create duplicate infrastructure in the cloud provider platform like the existing infrastructure and redeploy the applications to that infrastructure; with the help of tools like Jenkins or Chef

Pros

• Main motivation of migration method is time which is fast
• Architecture will be intact and familiar
• Needs very less training and no re designing

Cons

• With the migration we have not solved any problems
• The cloud doesn’t work the same way as our datacenter does
• Ongoing monthly cost would be more expensive
• We will be charged for every reserved CPU core and every gigabyte of data

Cloud Native:

On the other side of the coin which is opposite to the Cloud Migration is Cloud Native. Here the infrastructure and applications are specially designed to run on the cloud.

Sometimes it is referred as Replatforming, here it involves hard look at all our current infrastructure and applications. In this approach we can take advantage of immutable infrastructure patterns; managing declarative state is the cloud-native approach to the infrastructure design and implementations.

Pros

• Take advantages of many hours of investment from the cloud providers
• Less time is needed to manage the underlying infrastructure and applications
• More time to focus on business logic and innovation products to the market
• Great for dynamically scaling scale out, scale in, scale up and scale down

Cons

• Biggest drawback is the time to create the applications in replatforming approach
• Full replatforming might takes a more than a year

Other Considerations:

People are the most important in these cloud native and cloud migration journey. Process, in the journey cloud adoption putting a ease and effective process is vital; like engineers asking for the storage, computing and networking and how the code would be deployed into production? We have lot of advantages but managing the cost is critical, we need to consider this factor very effectively by adopting the right pricing model, with correct ground for experimentations.

With that, whether we choose to move our existing infrastructure or cloud native, it’s very important to understand how the cloud is different from our traditional data center. So better to unlearn the traditional approach and start with new learnings. It looks like old wine in same bottle, but in the cloud it requires a different approach, cost model, and infrastructure management than building a new data center. Let’s make sure our processes change when we move to the cloud to reap the benefits of Cloud.

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