The 6R's for Migrating to Cloud

As part of migrating to cloud from monolithic servers, we often implement different strategies. This post talks about 6R's of Cloud Migration.

Rehosting

• Otherwise known as “lift and shift.”

As name suggest, lift and shift is generally — lifting servers or applications from their current environment, which is generally on-premises — and shifting them to infrastructure in the public cloud and rehosting the application there.

The Rehosting strategy is a very common strategy for organizations which is starting their Cloud journey.

Replatform

• Often called as "modified form of lift and shift"

In Replatform you might make a optimizations to your application to achieve some sort of benefit.
For example, You may be looking to reduce the amount of time you spend database instances by migrating to a database-as-a-service platform like Amazon RDS

Repurchase

-Moving to a different product (Drop and Shop)

This may mean ending existing Services and repurposing same services on new platforms. Like Moving a CRM to Salesforce.com

Refactor

• basically re-architecting

Re-imagining how the application is architected and developed, typically using cloud-native features. This is typically driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment.

One of the key problems with refactoring is that it’s going to take a little bit of time and expertise.

Retain

-Usually this means “revisit” or do nothing (for now).

With this use case, it may make sense to retain your applications in the current environment and implement a hybrid or part migration strategy. You should only migrate what makes sense for the business and you probably have reasons to retain.

Retire

-Get rid of

This strategy involves identifying the applications that are no longer used and can be turned off so the business can focus on services that are widely used and priority. Like some of the other strategies it also require technical expertise to make sure things are done correctly.