An overview of the cloud migration problem
This section describes the functional/business requirements for the Landorous use case, as follows:
- We will discuss the challenges of the Landorous use case. As one of the world’s largest retail companies, this organization has many on-premises-based workloads. The core pain point for Landorous is that the maintenance outage every week causes a loss of millions, affecting the company’s cash flow. In addition, the maintenance outage is a painful process and time consuming. For 8 hours of maintenance outage each week, they lose approximately 1.5 million USD in revenue. The lead developer and teams need to work on weekends for the maintenance outage. Due to manual and redundant activities, several problems arise during the maintenance outage window every week. The company has outsourced some of its development work to third-party organizations, which costs a lot.
- The business teams want to move fast and scale up. However, with the current infrastructure, this is very tough. Therefore, they have assessed that a simple web application integration to their integration platform takes 2 and a half months, excluding the functionality development work. Figure 1.1 shows the workload of the current ecosystem:
Figure 1.1 – The current workload in data centers
In addition, the core integration platform connects multiple systems that are situated either on-premises or on other public clouds, as shown in the following system context diagram:
Figure 1.2 – The system context diagram
- The company wants to create new business opportunities as well as new departments. However, the current infrastructure needs a considerable investment for additional hardware and software. They also need extra management and support for new infrastructure in their on-premises data center. In addition, they are constantly struggling to find skills, and manual management is not helping them at all.
- Some simple workflows – for example, validating the age of a customer for alcohol or validating an e-prescription for medicine – are manual, which causes a delay in service execution. The customer has expressed their dissatisfaction with that.
- The on-premises data warehouse requires an extreme level of governance, security, optimization, and orchestration for maintenance. All those activities are primarily manual and dependent on a database administrator group.
- Applications have been developed over decades based on legacy technology. There is a lack of documentation and automation for deployment.
- There is a profound link between application data and its enterprise complexities. Any simple change to the application requires an extreme level of effort and investment. Therefore, strangling the Matrix from Hell in monolithic applications is very challenging.
- A legacy workload inherits complex integration models with non-standard data models, which imposes challenges. For example, let’s assume that several COBOL applications have been running without support for the last year due to a lack of skills and expertise.
- The customer wants to improve service quality as well as customer satisfaction. Therefore, they intend to use artificial intelligence (AI) to use modern technology, such as process mining, automated workflow, and business insight. However, setting up modern technology in their on-premises data center is very expensive, and the time to market is exponentially high.
As shown in Figure 1.1, the organization has a different kind of workload in its existing data center. The applications for the customer are too many, as shown in Figure 1.3:
Figure 1.3 – A typical hairball infrastructure for on-premises monolithic applications and integrated workloads
The company sets some goals for improvement, as follows:
- Decrease outages, reduce painful processes, and allow teams to move fast and scale.
- Increase cash flow with automation and reduce cost for infrastructure buildings and management.
- Validate a business case that will provide immediate and long-term net worth due to cloud transformation.
The company started a program to explore different business cases to achieve these goals, as follows:
- Add more workforce and increase skills and benefits for the existing workforce.
- Add an incentive for an additional working hour.
- Refresh technology and add new components to the existing data center.
- Cloud migration.
To help this organization migrate their workload to the cloud and get the maximum benefits from the program, we need to understand the requirements, business value proposition, current workload, main challenges, and other dependencies. We also need to define the correct roadmap for their cloud migration.
Let’s now understand the basics of cloud transformation, different industry strategies, and their potential benefits, which will help us define the roadmap for the organization.