The decisions you make as you plan your cloud migration have a long-term impact on both the effectiveness of your cloud technology and how much your cloud will cost you.
You’ll start feeling those cloud costs as soon as you start your migration. The options for migrating to cloud can be relatively quick and cheap up front, as in lift and shift, or slower and more expensive, as in refactoring and going cloud native. But once you’ve made it to cloud, cloud native can save you money in the long term.
Cloud Native Migrations Require Rethinking and Rewriting
The reason doing a cloud native migration takes longer and costs more than simple lift and shift is that you need to spend much more time on both analysis and implementation. Even well-architected onsite applications aren’t often a match for the highly distributed, automatically scalable cloud native environment.
Rewriting code to fit that new structure requires a significant amount of time to design the new application before implementing it. Because of the major change to the architecture, the development process needs to include thorough testing. And because the cloud is new to your team, they need to spend time becoming familiar with the cloud offering and setting up the tools needed for developing and testing a cloud native application.
All of that adds up to a major amount of developer time and cost before switching production to the cloud.
Cloud Native Migrations Save Money in the Long Term
That investment of time on reworking applications for the cloud can save a significant amount of time in the long term. The benefits come in terms of better performance, lower costs, and more flexible environments that provide high levels of agility. Cloud native applications leverage microservices that can easily be distributed across regions to take advantage of different pricing in different locations, as well as scaling up or down to match demand. Each component of the application can be matched to the most effective cloud resource, allowing you to finely control costs, unlike monolithic conventional applications that require every component to use the same resource no matter the actual requirements.
What this means is that the time invested in building a cloud native application sets you up for a future where you can manage every piece of the application to meet its specific performance, reliability, and cost needs.
Cost Control Is Necessary Whichever Approach You Use
Of course, whether you lift and shift or go cloud native, you need to keep an eye on cloud costs. The dynamic, distributed nature of cloud makes tracking those expenditures difficult no matter how your workloads are architected; because cloud native applications can have more individual pieces, tracking them can require additional effort.
Using a tool like CloudHealth can help you keep an eye on your many cloud components and ensure cost saving policies are being applied across all your cloud services. You get a consolidated view of all cloud resources and their utilization, allowing you to optimize usage. Going cloud native lets you fine-tune your spending even more. Contact VAST IT Services to learn how CloudHealth can help you bring cloud spending under control, whether you lift-and-shift or rewrite applications to make the best use of the cloud.
