It does not matter if you are an administrator or developer. If you have not started your cloud projects, you should enjoy the relative calm to take your first steps in the cloud. Here are some tips to follow to experience the public cloud without constraints and in all serenity.
1. Determine specific use cases
It is imperative to start the test with a clear idea of what you want to test. Determine a few real-life uses known in the company and compare the results. This will allow you to test the cloud compatibility with your current applications. The Cloud offers you the opportunity to deploy a different configuration. So feel free to rethink the architecture of the application to optimize its performance.
2. Inform and involve all levels of the company
Before you start flying on LetsCloud platform, make sure your company is willing to move towards this new model. It is essential to make these opportunities clear for your company and / or your business.
Make clear internally your willingness to launch this experiment to generate interest around the project. At the same time, you will be able to collect the needs of trades that would like to seize this opportunity to develop a specific use case. At the end of the experiment, make a debriefing of your experiment presenting the approach, the results and the next steps.
3. Choose the supplier who matches to your use cases
Concentrate on one or two offers chosen from the criteria that seem most relevant to you: data sovereignty and location, price, security, performance, open-source vs. proprietary technology, financial base, etc. Do not rush, take the time to find the supplier whose catalog of services will allow you to deploy your own use cases.
4. Identify and document performance indicators
To get the most out of your experiment, measure pragmatically the benefits and difficulties to compare them with the existing one. Here are some indicators that you can follow as an example:
- the monthly cost of a cloud environment vs. the on-premise cost;
- time spent deploying and administering servers or the full application environment;
- the time of availability;
- the wealth of features available vs on-premise features / equipment;
- Network latency
- the loading time of the web pages.
5. Have your supplier accompany you
Providers have understood this well, the key to cloud adoption is support. Feel free to request yours or subscribe to support services to benefit from training in the concepts and use, expertise on cloud architecture, deployment support, etc …
6. Test, fail, start over…
As with any new topic, the learning curve may be steep, although new management interfaces are making it easier to deploy and manage an infrastructure. Do not give up, failures or difficulties are part of the process.
One of the strengths of the public cloud is the ability to build your environments the way you want and in a few clicks. Get some of it! Moreover, it is in this spirit that the new Cloud-native applications are developed: resilience, elasticity and modularity!
By the end of the tests you will have enough experience to lay the first bricks of a broader migration to the cloud. You’ll know the metrics and criteria that are most important to you. Also, have already experienced deploying and managing environments in the public cloud.
You’ll have a better idea of which applications you can migrate to the cloud and which ones you prefer to keep on your private servers. You will be ready to launch a more advanced experiment on the aspects of the Cloud to which you are most sensitive.
To go further, see the articles and tutorials on LetsCloud community.
