5 Phases for migrating to Google Cloud Platform

The number of businesses using cloud platform for business purposes are growing rapidly. It is estimated that almost 70% startups employ cloud computing including Google cloud platform services in Dubai. While many businesses rushing to adopt cloud, it may not be a good idea to implement Google Cloud Platform services without proper planning and understanding. A sequential approach to migrate your application and data is recommended for the migration process.

Phase I: Assess.

Before even moving further, you must evaluate and understand how suitable your applications are the cloud.  You must understand not every app may not be suitable for cloud or at least at this stage don’t need to be migrated to cloud. You must think about performance requirements, users of your applications if these users are your clients then you must be more careful while moving. Consider licensing issues, compliance and data /application dependencies. With careful assessment, you will be able to categories you apps in easy to move, hard to move and cannot move application.  To our experience applications that are easy to move are first to migrate. Internal Web apps and batch processing applications are good candidates for the cloud. these apps can scale according to needs.

Phase II: Pilot.

At This stage where you choose one or two application and then try them move to cloud.  At this stage you must learn about cloud computing platform and design patterns, you consider performance options by validating them. Think about different licensing options and should understand how to perform a rollback.

Remember!

• Don’t try to overdo things by skipping Pilot steps
• Don’t try to do it all at once nor transfer all apps to cloud at once.

Phase III: Move Data

At this phase, you will be moving your data to the cloud. You may come across experts who will suggest you to move your applications first and then after that start moving your data. However, Google Cloud Platform services suggest otherwise. Many applications usually have a lot of dependencies on each other while having lot of data. If you carefully move your data to the cloud with a proper plan, it can help you can successful migration at a later stage. At this stage, you can also consider various cloud storage options like Google Cloud Storage, SQL, Bigtable, Datastore or other database services offered by good cloud. Also, this is time to plan how you are going to move all data will it be offline disk imports, batch file transfer, database dumping or any other methods. It all depend on the size of your data and specific requirements.

You might be interested in our other post “Key Factors to consider when moving to cloud”.

Phase IV: Move Applications

At this phase, your data is already available in the cloud, and you are ready to move actual apps as well.   There are still many decisions to make however you must keep things simple to be in control, avoid complexity, try to keep your application up and running with minimum efforts. For example at this stage doing straight lift and shift or you can get an app in the cloud in the same way like backing it there. With backing up, you can always have access to full copy for your data and apps with the full environment in Google cloud platform.

Read our earlier post to learn “How Cloud Computing Can make your small business grow”?

Phase V: Optimize

At this phase, it’s where the real usage of Google cloud platform service starts. Once you have done with an application that you want to migrate and have moved its all data to cloud platform now, you can begin thinking to optimize it. The main purpose of optimizing is making it better in performance and gets most out of it. For example at this stage you can think about add redundancy in availability zones, think to use elasticity within auto scaling groups, or even implement enhanced monitoring by using Stakdriver. You even want to offload fixed assets of your application tier into cloud storage or by utilizing Pub/Sub-function you can perform decoupling of tiers.

Google`s deployment manager that is used to make transition to Google cloud easier can help with launch and scaling of new instances.

Whitehats is authorized Managed Google Cloud Platform Services provider in Dubai. Contact for free advice and consultation. Our IT engineers help you through the whole process of migration of applications to G cloud.