Migrating to the cloud is centered around a pre-defined framework
- Assess
- Plan – in this phase the things to consider are
- From an Enterprise perspective, you should consider changes to the Operational model when moving to a shared responsibility mode, compliance and security requirements and Data Residency restrictions
- The resource hierarchy needs to also be considered in terms of how the organization structure maps onto folders and projects. Quota management should also be a consideration to control how much of a resource can be consumed.
- IAM considerations such as mappings for the administrative roles, identity integration/SSO, and service accounts for applications.
- Billing considerations include understanding how cloud billing maps to internal billing processes, how to allocate costs to appropriate cost center and defining who has access to cloud billing.
- As networking relates to migrations, understand the data transfer models including egress billing and zonal/regional/global resources.
- Deploy – Automatic deployment is preferred over manual deployment.
- Configuration management tools are useful for configuring or deploying the environment or to implement a deployment process for your workloads.
- Configuration automation will help to structure the deployment into an automated and auditable process
- Infrastructure as Code tools allow you to programmatically deploy your infrastructure entirely through the API
- Container orchestration tools like K8S when you have already containerized your applications.
- Optimize – set realistic goals to optimize your environment and teams. Measure success against these goals. Optimization can be planned for service management or cost management and can be implemented through moving to more cloud native services, upskilling a team, codifying or automating the environment, etc.
Data Migration Options
3 options are available for data migration (outside of application specific replication, or using Cloud Migrate)
- gsutil should be used for smaller migration volumes from on-prem
- a few TB with normal enterprise network connectivity
- a small number of files
- Storage Transfer Service should be used to migrate data from other cloud providers or from GCS to GCS. If bandwidth is sufficient and available, STS for On-Prem can be used for larger volumes of on-prem data located on NFS drives.
- Transfer Appliance should be used for large transfers where bandwidth is limited. In general volumes above 10TB should be considered as candidates for a physical transfer depending on bandwidth.
Cloud Migration for Compute Engine (formerly Velostrata) can be used to migrate already virtualized VMs to GCP.
- Source environments AWS, Azure, VMware
- Min Bandwidth larger of 20Mbps or 0.5Mbps per concurrent VM to be migrated
- Minimizes bandwidth by 75% using dedup, etc.