Lift and Shift, does it work?
Several strategies can be applied when migrating workloads from the on-premises data centre to the cloud. They are commonly referred to as the 7Rs. They are Refactor, Replatform, Repurchase, Rehost (Lift and Shift), Relocate, Retain and Retire. You can read more about them through this link. Today, we focus on Lift and Shift. This article highlights insights from Michael Levan on StreamingClouds, hosted by Kevin Evans and Robin Smorenburg. Hop on.
Lift and Shift, does it work?
It has two parts: what is happening in the underlying and where you move the application. The underlying piece: Storage is storage, memory is memory, networks are networks, and firewall rules are firewall rules. These are things that do not change. However, what changes is how you run it and, ultimately, the platform where you run it.
For example, the Kubernetes project remains the same. It is on GitHub. You can access it and deploy the code. Yet, where you will run it could be vastly different. Take a Cilium configuration or a Helm chart running on Elastic Kubernetes Service. Attempting to run that same Helm chart on Azure Kubernetes Service will likely not work seamlessly.
Therefore, you must do more than lift and shift things in the cloud. The way that you are going to run your applications is going to be vastly different depending on the target destination. The same would apply to Serverless, platform as a Service, and Openshift; you name it. The underlying concepts are always going to be the same. However, where you are running will depend on how you run the application, regardless of whether the platform is the same.
Digital transformation is a buzzword within enterprises looking to consume cloud services. While you do not have to re-write your application stack in another language, you cannot just take what you are running on bare metal servers and transition it to AWS, Azure, or GCP. These are different technologies. That is not what digital transformation means.
Think about it as planting an apple seed and expecting it to grow into an orange :-)
