Why You Should Definitely Migrate Existing Apps to the Cloud

Organizations are rapidly adopting cloud technologies, but migration is still proving to be a challenge. What should you look out for? What applications make the most sense to migrate? How should applications get refactored to be cloud friendly? What are some lessons learned by those making the move? In this series of articles, you'll get practical advice from those who have experience helping companies successfully move to cloud environments. There is an area that deserves significant attention, and we hope that you'll participate in the conversation.

This InfoQ article is part of the series “Cloud Migration”. You can subscribe to receive notifications via RSS.

Do your customers or users really care whether your application is hosted in a tier 1 data center or the public cloud? Apparently not. But they do care about the experience they go through while using your service on a regular basis. Customers expect a quick and reliable service that doesn’t succumb to spike in traffic and consistently performs great. They also expect you to update your service deliveries on par with the latest technology developments.

To understand this with an analogy in business parlance, this translates to:

Is your existing application (say a healthcare app) infrastructure agile and flexible enough to let you quickly roll out a new feature say, alert a patient when it’s time to take pills by using a light and voice reminder, on a wearable (read smartwatch)?

In this article we’ll explore various benefits of migrating your existing apps to the cloud in detail so that you can make an informed decision.

Why Migrate?

Elastic Capacity

The above occurrences are quite common and often grab more media attention than they deserve. Interestingly, although the first time a startup app experiences a crash due to flash crowd it’s more of a sweet than sour experience, you simply can’t ignore a crash.

Can your app survive an unprecedented spike in normal traffic?

To answer this question you may need to ask your infrastructure provider how quickly it can add capabilities to take care of the spike. Is your provider capable of provisioning (or deprovisioning) resources almost instantly (within minutes)?

Unlike traditional service providers, cloud services are designed with built-in tools to facilitate rapid elasticity which ensures that:

1. Extra resources (example Virtual Machines, VMs) are provisioned to serve users responsively in case of peak traffic due to a flash crowd.
2. Extra resources are deprovisioned (VMs are released back to the cloud) as soon as the flash crowd is gone. Saves a lot of money!
3. Your application has on demand instant access to infinite resources.

To summarize this, at any point in time based on your workload, cloud services are capable of offering you the right provisioning, yes it’s neither over-provisioning nor under-provisioning – quick and automatic.

A traditional infrastructure provider may take hours (in reality days) to react to an increasing / decreasing workload as they require manual intervention to facilitate this kind of a responsive mechanism.

Note: Do not confuse elasticity with scalability. Elasticity is implicitly achieved by deploying on a cloud infrastructure whereas an application is scalable by virtue of its architecture. An application is scalable when it has the ability to accommodate more load when extra power (RAM, CPU) is added to a physical machine (Vertical Scaling/Scale Up) or extra physical machines are added (Horizontal Scaling/Scale Out) to the existing resource pool.

Apparently moving to a cloud service doesn’t always guarantee scalability. An application build on Standard edition databases of Oracle or SQL Server that do not support partioning (a prerequisite for a scalable architecture) may require huge re-engineering efforts to scale. NoSQL databases are highly scalable. Similarly, your application may be hosted on a multi-core server but they’re of little use if your application has not implemented multi-threading. This is the reason why Google has come up with a new language Go – to make concurrency (multi-threading) easier.

However, here you must understand that not all apps require elastic capabilities. For example, if you are a small business running an internal HR (Human Resource) management app only for 50 odd employees and you’re not expecting a significant growth in number of employees then this might not be a good use case to migrate to the cloud just for the sake of elasticity!

Cost Reduction

Cost reduction is achieved in two ways:

1. CapEx free expenses

• No capital expenses as you don’t need to buy IT infrastructure. Cloud providers do not require any long term commitment.

2. Pay as you go.

• Pay for what you use. Metered by Usage is one of the essential attributes of a cloud service. The service plans are based on number of hours in case of pre-configured VMs and GB in case of bandwidth, data transfer, storage etc. Configure and provision it right - you pay only for what you use.

This is quite in contrast with the traditional data center approach where most of the time you over-provision it and keep paying for something which you may use once in a blue moon!

Agility - Faster Time to Market

As an entrepreneur you must have the vision to look into the future, spot an opportunity, make a quick decision to build a new feature in your application, push code, release it to the market and surprise your customers (& your competition too!). In contrast to an automated infrastructure and a quick turnaround time offered by cloud service providers, traditional service providers have a bureaucratic request, order, procure and install practices.

Have you noticed how in 2015 the eCommerce businesses are gradually moving from mobile-first to app-only strategy? In case this is a suitable strategy for you, are you agile enough to quickly respond to this kind of a technology shift?

Focus on Your Business

As most of the IT related chores can be automated by opting for the cloud, managing it through traditional ways is simply a wastage of valuable time and energy as it doesn’t directly contribute to your core business.

Keep yourself away from the distractions and align and engage your workforce in higher value activities. Don’t forget – Time is the new money.

Increased Availability Reliability and Performance

If not in cloud service SLAs, where else can you find a genuine three nines and four nines (99.99%) availability? Although traditional data centers may claim to match the same figures, most of them actually don’t have an appropriate measuring and monitoring services required for an accurate audit for their SLAs.

To increase the availability and reliability cloud services are offered from multiple availability zones (AWS, Rackspace), federated network of public cloud providers and multi-hypervisor design to reach that elusive 100% availability!

Many existing applications, whose users were from a specific region that migrated to the cloud also reported a decreased network latency by selecting a cloud provider in the appropriate geographic region.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

As they say:

If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

--- A variation of Murphy’ Law

Can your application withstand a disaster i.e. network/power outage, fire, earthquake, storm, flood or a physical damage to the building where your server resources are housed?

A DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) requires meticulous planning and architecting to recognize a failure and respond quickly to mitigate any loss to the business. DR is a tricky subject because a majority of the businesses either don’t have a DRP or have it in format that is bound to fail due to minor gaps in the overall planning which they may have missed because of lack of rehearsal. They don’t realize this until they are actually struck by that rare disaster!

A battle-hardened DRP is critical for Business Continuity (BC). Cloud is resilient by design and you can choose the right set of tools and configurations so that your business is least affected by a disaster.

The Cloud is Secure

100% security is an illusion. If you have to make a decision based on the available choices, cloud services are in no way less secure than any of the existing systems in place. Cloud service providers are known for their innovations. It is apparent that at any point in time they would implement better physical and logical security practices than a standalone on-premise data center operation. Many cloud providers are now ISO, PCI DSS, EU Model Clauses and other global security agencies certified.

Moreover not all the applications require a bank grade security. Do they? In case you’ve highly sensitive data or your app is subjected to specific security & privacy regulations (such as HIPAA and HITECH) you can opt for Hybrid Cloud Service (recommended for Healthcare apps).

Every now and then the questions raised on cloud security are more of a FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) than reality.

A Few Other Benefits You Can’t Ignore

Apart from the above mentioned benefits that are instantly available once you migrate to the cloud, there are various intangible benefits as well. Public cloud services are green because Resource Pooling is one of the essential characteristics of the Cloud.

Cloud services empowers you to efficiently work-from-anywhere with increase collaboration and efficient document control. While migrating may require a little re-engineering here & there it also opens up opportunities for you to think of implementing some cutting edge technologies like Docker (container based virtualization that has seen unprecedented adoption) for easier deployment. Also, with IoT taking the center stage in 2015 you may need to go for microservice architecture integrated with your existing apps to address the near future demands of your customers.

Which Applications are Suitable for Migration to Cloud Services?

As a rule of thumb most applications developed during last seven years – n-tier or the popular 3-tier web applications, batch processes and backend services might be a good fit for migration. Older applications may require more re-engineering effort. It all depends on the architecture of the existing web application.

There can be various factors which can make an existing application incompatible (or may require tremendous effort) for cloud migration:

1. A tightly coupled architecture, hardcoded configurations.

2. A database that is not supported by the cloud.

3. Requires specific hardware to function - hardware based encryption, mainframes etc.

4. Dependencies on various third party apps.

5. Licensing issues.

Here’s a look up table for a ready reference which might help you in quick decision making:

Action Speaks Louder than Words

Here’s a list of organizations which migrated their existing applications to the cloud. It also mentions the benefits they acquired after migration.

Conclusion

With tens of thousands of apps already migrated and leveraging the cloud it is proved beyond doubt that the cloud is real and has lived up to industry’s expectations. Irrespective of the location and domain, majority of the companies around the world are using cloud services in some form or the other.

Back in 2008, when the cloud was at its peak of inflated expectations, the CEO of a multi-billion dollar IT corporation had said:

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it?

The IT behemoths who ignored the trend are now viewed as a laggard with declining fortune. From last couple of years somehow they are scrambling for the cloud – playing catchup! Plan your move and act before it’s too late.

About the Author

Basant Singh is a software developer with 12 years of experience in application and database architecture. For the past 5 years he is leveraging his programming skills to power startups to go beyond the MVP stage. Currently he is passionately gearing up to work on his next project on Go Programming and Docker. In the beginning of his career, he has built applications for Fortune 500 clients from across the globe while employed in a Multinational Corporation. Blogs: Techno-Pulse and GolangPro. Twitter: @SinghBasant.

Organizations are rapidly adopting cloud technologies, but migration is still proving to be a challenge. What should you look out for? What applications make the most sense to migrate? How should applications get refactored to be cloud friendly? What are some lessons learned by those making the move? In this series of articles, you'll get practical advice from those who have experience helping companies successfully move to cloud environments. There is an area that deserves significant attention, and we hope that you'll participate in the conversation.

This InfoQ article is part of the series “Cloud Migration”. You can subscribe to receive notifications via RSS.