Optimizing Cloud Migration

Chapter 1. Optimizing Cloud Migration

Introducing the Trend: the Move to the Cloud

Cloud services are redefining how many businesses are building and hosting their applications. Flexibility, scalability, cost reduction, and reduced overheads are just some of the reasons why the case for moving to the cloud is compelling to many businesses. This is a very real trend, with a 2015 survey reporting that 72% of executives stated that the cloud was essential to their strategy, and 90% of businesses reported using the cloud in some capacity.

This move is also accompanied by a move away from server-based solutions to a world of Software as a Service-based solutions—with modern applications increasingly moving toward being jigsaw puzzles built from many different building blocks. Load balancing, file storage, databases, search, caching, authentication, data warehousing, microservices, APIs, media streaming, data processing, job queuing, and workflow are just some of the services available to build cloud-based applications. True cloud applications are fundamentally different from traditional hosted applications, not just in how they are hosted, but in the nature of how they go about solving problems to deliver resilient and flexible solutions.

The promise of the cloud, therefore, is to enable you to build a system with levels of performance and availability that wouldn’t have been available to you when building an on-premise solution (at least without an investment of time and money that is beyond the scope of most companies). There are many challenges to achieving this, both practical and technological, but one area that is often overlooked is that of Internet performance.

This book will help take you on that journey—from your first foray into the cloud, to having a highly performant cloud-based system, discussing the best methods for optimizing Internet performance at each stage.

What Is Internet Performance?

Internet performance refers to the overhead of traversing the complex path of connectivity across the global Internet between the user’s ISP and the entry point to your company’s infrastructure. It is also sometimes referred to as the middle mile or backhaul.

Optimizing Internet performance essentially involves optimizing the route that data takes to cross the public Internet and reach your systems. This can range from understanding the routing that is in place between different locations, or serving content from different locations based on the location of the user.

Traditionally, this area of performance has been overlooked, as it is seen as being “out of our control.” However, in recent years there has been a growth in understanding from organizations that this performance is a representation of their brand, and it is irrelevant to the end user whether the degradation occurs inside or outside the company’s network. This has led to a growth in demand from organizations for the visibility and control necessary to improve performance of connectivity across their online infrastructure. To meet this demand, a range of tools known collectively as Internet Performance Management (IPM) tools have been created.

Flawed Thinking: You Can’t Control Internet Performance in the Cloud

It is a mistake to think that because of the way cloud services are provided—as off-the-shelf services—you cannot take any control of Internet performance. In actual fact, the move to the cloud can potentially give you more control over the levels of Internet performance that you can deliver.

The geographically distributed nature of cloud platforms allows you more control over where you deliver content from. The possibility of using multiple clouds to dynamically serve users based on location further enhances this. However, optimizing Internet performance requires attention, and it is easy to deliver suboptimal Internet performance if it is not addressed properly.

The following chapters will illustrate how to stay on top of this challenge when moving to the cloud and guide you through the various steps en route to delivering a highly Internet-performant cloud solution.