Cloud Migration — Lift & Shift, or Containerization?
Published in
2 min readJul 7, 2018
How to decide between containerization and VM migration.
Many enterprises are evaluating containers and PaaS platforms as their preferred paths to cloud. These are certainly attractive options, but there are a few factors to consider when making a choice between PaaS/Containers and infrastructure to cloud:
- Urgency of migration — Containerization and DevOps implementation require at least some of sort of implementation effort and time. If there are hard deadlines on migration, then containerization may not be a good strategy.
- Availability of skills on DevOps and Containers — Containerization and DevOps implementations often go hand in hand. An enterprise may not have these skills available in house to drive this effort. However, some cloud migration paths (such as Lift and Shift) are easier for traditional IT teams to adopt.
- Greenfield vs Legacy apps — Adopting container and PaaS services is easier when an application is being built ground up. For legacy applications, infrastructure migration may be a better choice.
- Current state of DevOps and container adoption in the organization — If an enterprise is adopting container and PaaS strategy enterprise-wide, then it is more likely that the technical and operational processes, platforms and skills are in place to handle containerization.
- Enterprise’s attitude towards cloud lock-in — Containers and PaaS are also often a way for some enterprises to avoid getting locked into one cloud platform. Whereas, other enterprises commit to a single platform wholeheartedly, based on either the business relationship, or the alignment between platform features and enterprise requirements (For example, a traditional Microsoft shop is more likely to choose Azure as their preferred cloud platform). For the latter, directly using cloud services may be a more cost effective option.
This blog is part of our ongoing cloud series. To find out how GlobalLogic can help in your cloud migration journey, please reach out to us at cloud@globallogic.com.
