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Migrate your workloads to the cloud

Preparing to Move

Article from ADMIN 49/2019

By Martin Loschwitz

Move a workload to the cloud without trouble, and leverage cloud benefits for a conventional setup.

Cloud computing has revolutionized IT, which in turn has led to a gradual shift in priorities among service providers and customers, starting with classic hosting service providers, who are increasingly becoming platform providers and no longer operate servers for individual customers.

Many startups and smaller service providers now see their opportunities, because customers are taking advantage of variety rather than committing to vendor tie-in, as in the past. Finally, customers are increasingly using approaches such as serverless computing and have completely stopped operating their own infrastructure.

Hardware Is a Pain

The customer has good reasons for doing without their own hardware. Maintaining and operating hardware is a troublesome, cost-intensive task. If you entrust this work to a platform provider, you can kill several birds with one stone. You get rid of the assets in the data center and save a considerable amount of paperwork. Moreover, clouds are even cheaper because providers pass on the savings they have made thanks to efficient processes to their customers.

The one flaw in the beauty of this setup is that the move from bare metal to the cloud does not simply happen on its own. If you have a mental image of cool admins sitting in their command centers with drinks in their hands, watching their apps move to the cloud, you definitely need a reality check. Migrating to a cloud environment is a tedious task, with many pitfalls just waiting for the admin to stumble into. In most cases it is not enough simply to create virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud and copy the data over (Figure 1).

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