Key Architectural Considerations to Evaluate when moving applications to cloud - Part 2

  Ø  If an application migration requires lot of integration or coordination between internal and external environments on top of the cloud services, it will become a layer between the cloud provider and inhouse applications will struggle to keep up with the rate of innovation in the cloud provider’s services. Cloud provides numerous services that are portable. Organizations should not build or acquire layers of insulation on top of cloud provider's native features in order to perceive portability.

  Ø  Modern cloud service providers can auto scale in order to create a resilient and highly available applications. The cloud service providers have different solutions to provide the ability to store and replicate data. If a legacy application is critical enough to meet the requirement of fault tolerant,  moving such applications to the cloud can be easier to manage.

  Ø  Cloud is a better fit if Speed and Agility are the primary business drivers of an organization. In order to do so it is required for applications to have continuous and direct access to the cloud provider's fast pace of innovation. Only by building directly upon provider-native features will there be the desired business agility and rate of improvement. Organizations will struggle to easily port applications across cloud providers by sacrificing speed, agility and innovation.

  Ø  Another area to consider is the factor of repeatability for applications. Typical scheduled deployment times in legacy application require a down time along with human intervention in doing the same manual tasks repeatedly. Also, in case of disaster recovery or outage most of the tasks carried out are manual. Typical cloud services excel to execute the same tasks multiple times without failure. Most of the application recovery or deployments are auto managed and incur very little to no human interventions.

  Ø  Cloud services generally provides high flexibility and testability. Applications can be tuned to run on need basis. Test environment application can be a good candidate to move to the cloud especially when doing a load or stress testing. Different applications can be made available on the fly based on different hardware configuration, operating system and different regions and can be scaled up or down on need basis. This gets even easier with cloud providers excelling in containerized application and providing seamless continuous integration and deployment.

  Ø  If high performance, monitoring, volatility and high volume are the key requirement then the application needs quick development and high rate of innovation.  Cloud vendors do provide ready-made solutions to meet all such requirements. Performance benchmarks can be met with different solutions that fulfil the key constraints of Caching, Sharding, Archiving and Storage. Readymade tools can be configured to meet the requirement of in-depth monitoring, logging and analysing. Cloud providers have rich support for state-of-the art agile development modes including DevOps, containers, microservices and will be the first to have mature support for upcoming methods like serverless computing etc. Different pricing models and tenancy are also provided that can ensure cost is kept to the minimum.