A Practical Guide to Migrating Legacy Apps
Aled Sage, VP Engineering at Cloudsoft, lifted the rock of application migration to AWS to expose what’s underneath at the Cloud Pathway 2 event on Mar 27 hosted by Cloudsoft in Codebase, Edinburgh,
In the community spirit of the new Cloud Pathway series by Cloudsoft, the content was practical, actionable and intended to inform the audience so they went away knowing more about important AWS topics.
We are available to help if you need any help on any AWS cloud topic with a no-obligation chat with Cloudsoft Migration experts about Well Migrated or just Contact Us.
Practical reasons why businesses are migrating legacy applications to the cloud
Legacy isn’t a dirty word, but you might think it is when the IT industry uses it as a pejorative term for “old and out of date”.
Legacy is a good word outside of IT. It’s about value, importance, something worth keeping. And this is true in IT too: legacy applications often have important data, valuable algorithms, crucial business processes.
Legacy: denoting or relating to software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use.
Migrating legacy applications is about preserving value and adding to it by taking them from static, non-cloud on-premises environments and giving them new life on AWS.
Migration outcomes
The businesses we talk to migrate applications usually for multiple outcomes, not just one:
- Trade or avoid capital expense to variable expense
- Benefit from economies of scale
- Stop guessing capacity and buying for peak
- Increase speed and agility
- Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
- Go global in minutes
This applies whether you are a two-person startup or a thousand-person large enterprise.
Migration triggers
In addition to the reasons why businesses consider cloud, they also often have more than one trigger event or driver that gets them going to the cloud:
- Datacenter is full, contract is expiring or up for refresh.
- Immediate need to integrate acquisitions
- Urgent and unplanned capacity needs
- Software and hardware refresh
- Security threats
- Compliance
- Application innovation
- Software at the end of support contract
If these drivers and triggers resonate with you, get in touch with us to discuss Well-Migrated.
Migration challenges
Cloudsoft is staffed with experienced application and AWS experts that have migrated many applications to AWS.
As the leader of Cloudsoft’s AWS technical team, Aled pulled together their experience into five things everyone migrating their applications to the cloud needs to take care over:
- Poorly documented setup and processes: do you really know what it is you’re migrating?
- Hard-wiring: what non-cloud configurations are built into, and hidden in, your application
- Inter-dependencies: what non-cloud systems, that aren’t migrating, is your application dependent on / wired up to?
- Limiting risk: 1-way vs 2-way doors and practical iterative approaches
- Well-architected applications: are you _really_ exploiting AWS once you are there?
We can help you avoid or solve these kinds of migration challenges with Well-Migrated.
Summary
Application migration is about migrating the right apps for the right reasons in the right way. Aled’s presentation got key points over to the Cloud Pathway 2 audience in Edinburgh so they do it with their eyes open, and they know who they can contact for help!
View Aled’s slides below or talk to one of the Cloudsoft Migration experts about Well-Migrated.
