How to analyze your applications for a migration to Cloud? - Part Two

This is the second part of a method of analyzing the application portfolio for a lift and shift migration to Cloud. At this point, we should have a catalog of applications that will help us guide the analysis (and a bunch of prerequisites). We have identified the technical and business owners to interact with. We have developed a certain understanding of the technology stack and the business function of the majority of applications. Identifying the owners is important; it will allow us to have a single point of contact for each application.

So, what is the next step?

3. Pre-Check

For each application, we do a pre-check to determine the candidates.

Will the application (or its infrastructure components) live to see the day of migration?

If the client is going to retire the application, you obviously don’t need to migrate it. The same applies if the client has plans to move it to SaaS or upgrade it on a different setup. Vendors usually have their own path to Cloud. The technical owner of this application will decide if they can align their plans with the migration. If not, they will have to get ready for it.

There are some follow-up questions. How sure is the client about the date of retirement? Is it a concrete plan or a little more than good intentions? To be on the safe side, if the client is not 100% sure, it’s better to keep it on the “to-be-migrated” list.

Any known blockers for Cloud?

Emphasis on the “known” part. The client might have already tried to migrate or virtualize the application, or maybe the application works with a physical component. Maybe they already tested to move the app away, and it failed due to latency. Make sure to ask, and it will save you from a lot of analysis effort.

Of course, there are also regulatory and compliance requirements. Usually, the client has some ideas about this but remember to ask.

What does the application run on?

Cloud Service Providers do not support certain OSes. Make sure you check AWS, GCP and Azure for compatible OSes.

Hopefully, this will eliminate certain applications, and we will keep our focus on what can be moved. Now, let’s get to the next step.