Migrating Applications to the Cloud

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Handbook

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EDITOR’S NOTE

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DEPLOYING YOUR APPLICATIONS TO THE CLOUD

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HOW LEGACY APPS AFFECT ROI

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GAUGING CLOUD APP PERFORMANCE VIR TU ALIZA TION CL OUD APPLIC ATION DEVEL OPMENT HEAL TH IT NETW ORKING ST ORA GE ARCHITE C TURE D AT A CENTER MANA GEMENT BI/APPLIC ATIONS DIS A STER RE CO VER Y/COMPLIANCE SE CURITY

Migrating Applications

to the Cloud

Migrating applications to the cloud requires careful evaluation

of which apps make sense to move, how to deploy them and how

to assess the potential cost savings.

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Home Editor’s Note Deploying Your Applications to the Cloud How Legacy Apps Affect ROI

Gauging Cloud App Performance

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Getting Apps Safely to the Cloud

Moving applications to the cloud is one

of those ideas that seems at once perfectly sen-sible and frustratingly problematic. The chance to lighten the load on IT staff while saving money is appealing, but determining which applications can run effectively (and more cheaply) in the cloud is no small challenge. And just how do you go about determining how much you’ll ultimately save? IT consultant Tom Nolle offers some help with this puzzle. He walks us through the pro-cess of looking at compatibility, cost analysis, testing and other essential aspects of app mi-gration. For example, Nolle breaks down the options when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. Each model offers advantages and disadvantages, depending on which applica-tions you intend to shift to the cloud, which platforms those apps run on and how much expense you are trying to shift away from your data center operation. TechTarget senior writer Beth Pariseau, meanwhile, reports on how legacy applications pose a particular challenge to organizations using the public cloud. Enterprises of sufficient size and with skilled in-house IT staff, she found, can often run those legacy apps more cheaply on-premises than in the cloud. And what about performance? Cloud expert Paul Korzeniowski writes about the sorts of useful data that performance monitoring tools from various third-party vendors can—and cannot—provide about applications running in the cloud. n

Phil Sweeney, Managing Editor Data Center and Virtualization Group

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DEPLOYING APPLICATIONS

Deploying Your Applications to the Cloud

Any IT project

is a two-dimensional bal-ance of risk and reward, cost and benefit. The cloud doesn’t break this traditional model, but it complicates it. It’s often difficult to assess any of the four elements, much less balance all of them. The perfect formula for cloud success is complicated: Assess the cost-benefit profile of candidate applications, assess their technical suitability for the cloud and organize the mi-gration process to ensure success. But which applications are good candidates for deployment to the cloud? Which apps are better left out of your cloud plans? You’ll need to make these determinations on a technical basis, of course, but it’s just as important to weigh the costs of deploying particular applica-tions to the cloud versus holding them in place. That means close scrutiny of factors such as resource use and per-gigabyte costs. Beyond those considerations, you’ll need to devote time to preparing, securing and testing applications to be sure that what works on-premises will work just as effectively in a cloud environment. WHICH APPLICATIONS? The perfect application for cloud deployment is one that’s excessively expensive to run inter-nally. That higher cost can be associated with low or highly variable utilization, excessive op-erations support costs or an unusual resource need that’s hard to fulfill within the data center. Workloads running on independent servers, particularly at the departmental level, often fit this profile. Core applications that run on high-capacity data center systems or on virtualized server farms are less likely to be unreasonably expensive and thus less likely to benefit from cloud migration. Realizing cloud benefits means accepting

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DEPLOYING APPLICATIONS cloud costs, the second dimension of cloud ap-plication consideration. The pricing model for cloud services typically includes a component of processing/computing use, data storage costs and access costs. Applications that have low server utilization on-premises will have low utilization in the cloud and can likely run on the least-expensive compute resources. The hardest costs to assess are those associ-ated with cloud data and access. Most cloud plans will charge per gigabyte, per month for data storage and will also charge for access to data, so applications that are highly data-intensive are likely to be more expensive to run in the cloud. The best way of understanding cloud costs is to look at application/system logs for the sys-tems currently running candidate applications to understand their resource usage, particularly data usage. Based on real data, you can estimate cloud costs and pick applications with the low-est costs. If you started by picking applications with the best potential savings, the balance of sav-ings and cost will give you the list of the best cloud candidates. PREPARING APPLICATIONS Prepping applications for cloud deployment is the next critical step. An application running in the cloud uses some cloud provider resources and some of a company’s application resources, the same ones used to run the application in-ternally. Remember, what you contribute to the cloud as a part of an application image needs to be maintained by you. With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), you contribute all the software in the form of a machine image. Consequently, you need to main-tain this software image just as you would were it running on your own virtual machine. That means IaaS won’t displace software costs or software operations costs, limiting its savings. If your applications run on a popular plat-form such as Windows or Linux, you may be able to secure Platform as a Service cloud host- ing for them. This will save the cost and sup-port of the operating system and middleware. Software as a Service (SaaS) displaces the largest total internal cost because you provide nothing—the cloud includes all the hardware and software needed and the provider supports the combination. The challenge with SaaS is

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DEPLOYING APPLICATIONS that most applications you run today are likely not available as SaaS. At minimum, it may be necessary to accept the same application (CRM, for example) but from a different source, with different data formats and a different user interface (to which workers will need to be trained). Technical obstacles prevent certain applica-tions from being moved to the cloud because some apps require a special hardware configu-ration or operating system and middleware that cloud providers don’t support. In these cases, it is necessary to either drop the application from consideration or shift to a supplier or configu-ration that’s cloud-compatible. Where it’s necessary to make such a change, it’s almost always best to try to find a SaaS ver-sion of the application you need first. If that’s not possible, look for one that runs on an avail-able PaaS service. That will create more cloud savings and eliminate the need to train support personnel on maintaining machine images for a completely new application. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS Once applications are validated as cloud- compatible, your work isn’t done, though. Remember that in all forms of cloud computing, physical security is lost because the ap-plication and its data reside in someone else’s data center. The application images may include confi-dential information of all types, including encryption keys and logon information for intercomponent exchanges—even confidential data coded as an internal table. This informa-tion will have to be secured in some way before the application is migrated. It’s also important to verify that any man-agement and compliance practices that depend on exercising management interfaces that are

Technical obstacles prevent certain ap plications from being

moved to the cloud because some apps require a special hardware

configu ration or OS.

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DEPLOYING APPLICATIONS part of an application will still run when the application is moved to the cloud. Finally, all your application lifecycle manage-ment practices, but especially deployment and redeployment practices, will need to be updated to reflect that the application is hosted in the cloud. This is particularly true where other applications access the migrated app via an application programming interface. TESTING When it’s time to deploy an application, the process must proceed in a way that minimizes risks and validates both business and technical assumptions in an appropriate way. Most com-panies will run a technical pilot that tests the interfaces of the application, the management of the components and their performance, and the integration of the application with users and other applications and databases. This is also the first place where it’s possible to test cost assumptions by linking accumu-lated costs to data and CPU usage. The technical pilot would normally be fol- lowed by a functional pilot or field test to vali-date the performance of the application as well as the cost assumptions at scale. Only when this has been done would the application be considered ready for production. The steps may sound tedious, but over the long run following them can save you head- aches in proving your business case and sus-taining worker productivity. —Tom Nolle

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LEGACY APPS

How Legacy Apps Affect ROI

IT shops with the in-house expertise to run a virtual data center may not find added value in a move to the public cloud, especially for legacy applications. There’s a fine line between gaining flexibility with public cloud computing and taking on un- necessary expenses with pay-per-month pric-ing, not to mention a tricky cloud migration process, said Sean McDermott, CEO of Wind-ward IT Solutions, an IT service management and systems engineering firm based in Hern-don, Va. Windward is heavily invested in Salesforce. com for customer relationship management (CRM) but has considered CRM alternatives, including some on-premises possibilities. The company finds it increasingly difficult to justify paying Salesforce’s subscription cost of $125 per user, per month given that Windward is a technology-focused business with the exper-tise to host a CRM application in-house. Other Software as a Service providers typically charge less, McDermott said. Sugar Cor-porate from SugarCRM goes for about $45 per user, per month, with a total of about $15,000 per year. The enterprise version costs $60 per user, per month. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an-other example of a service that his company could bring back in-house. Windward IT uses a cloud service for $3,500 per month, but the recent release of the CudaTel VoIP switch ap-pliance by Barracuda Networks has given him pause. CudaTel costs $4,000 as a one-time capital expenditure. Tack on an estimated $500 a month for a cloud-based Session Initiation Protocol provider for call transfers, and the re-turn on investment would be realized in just a few months. VoIP switches have improved, server hard-ware has never been cheaper and the “race to zero” price competition among public cloud

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LEGACY APPS service providers may be slowing, McDermott said. Not every business is in a position to host a private cloud, but McDermott said Fortune 1000 companies usually have big IT staffs with a high level of technical expertise, which makes the public cloud harder to justify in terms of ROI. “You can go buy half a million dollars of [Cisco Systems’ Unified Computing System] and another quarter-million dollars of [other] technology and build your own cloud for less than a million dollars,” McDermott said. “When you start doing the math on the number of servers you can provision off that and the cost of a CPU per hour, you probably start look-ing at it going, ‘OK, what are the economics of moving to the public cloud?’” To simply transfer existing applications onto a cloud-hosted infrastructure is fairly point- less, unless it’s part of a bid to create higher-level service offerings, other IT pros said. “In your legacy platform, usually you’re just happy if you can deliver the same thing you were delivering in your data center” when there’s a move to public cloud, said Sean Perry, chief technology officer for specialized staff-ing firm Robert Half International, based in San Ramon, Calif. “There usually aren’t significant wins there, perhaps with the exception of [di-saster recovery] capabilities or failover. But for most development teams, that’s not high on their priority list.” Companies bent on using the public cloud may choose to discard legacy applications for newer cloud-based offerings, rather than port legacy apps to the cloud, Perry said. The bottom line? “The business doesn’t care who runs the server. They care what value they get out of a service,” said Arne Josefsberg, CTO for Ser-viceNow, which makes IT service automation software for private and public clouds. While analyst firms such as IDC predict

“ The business doesn’t care who

runs the server. They care what

value they get out of a service.”

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LEGACY APPS increases in public cloud adoption that could amount to a compound annual growth rate of 27% by 2015, a TechTarget survey of IT profes-sionals indicates a different outlook. Use of the cloud in general could be on a de-cline, based on the results of two TechTarget surveys of some 1,300 global IT respondents. A 2013 survey showed that 53% of respondents said they use cloud services now and 46% do not. In August 2012, 61% said they used cloud services now and 39% did not. Further, 601 respondents who do not cur-rently use cloud services indicated they aren’t immediately interested; 85% do not plan to use the cloud for at least a year, up from 80% in August, while 46% do not intend to use cloud IT services at all, compared with 40% in August. Control, existing infrastructure limitations and security were the primary explanations listed by those forgoing the cloud.But there was also pushback that cited existing in-house IT expenditures (31%) and concern over inad-equate benefits offered by the cloud (24%). Even when a public cloud is in use, some organizations aren’t necessarily committed to building an infrastructure on it, analysts noted. “We have talked to a lot of customers who have deployed four or five sizes of machines at Amazon or Rackspace. They will use the public cloud provider to find out how many resources they actually need, and then they’ll come back in-house and make a [virtual machine] in-ternally to match that,” said Kyle Hilgendorf, principal research analyst for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. —Beth Pariseau

Among respondents, 85% do not

plan to use the cloud for at least

a year, and 46% do not intend to

use cloud IT services at all.

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APP PERFORMANCE

Gauging Cloud App Performance

With more organizations using cloud

computing for mission-critical applications, performance has become an area of growing importance. But cloud application performance touches on a complex web of interactions that are of-ten difficult to gauge. A handful of tools from third-party vendors focused on cloud app performance has emerged to address such chal-lenges, but these products can present a series of tradeoffs rather than solutions. Radar Service from Cedexis Inc. measures response time from more than 1.7 million end nodes globally. The tool vendor offers a free service, supported by an open source model that examines major cloud service providers. Cedexis also offers a paid version for busi-nesses that want to more closely monitor their own cloud connections. CloudSpeedTest from CloudHarmony Inc. allows enterprises to benchmark the performance of applications delivered by multiple cloud providers. For example, it can monitor one cloud installment that supports servers, a second that hosts application storage and a third that handles the content delivery network. The CloudHarmony service relies on a variety of benchmarks developed by the Pho-ronix open source community. CloudSleuth from CompuWare Corp. moni-tors the application latency of leading cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, Liquid Web’s Storm on Demand and Rackspace man-aged cloud services. To gauge performance, CloudSleuth monitors about 200 different performance elements and conducts approxi-mately 3,000 tests daily. These cloud performance tools can give enterprise IT an idea of how applications are be-having, but they don’t reveal everything. First, service visibility is limited. The tools can’t monitor every item and application at

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APP PERFORMANCE every second, so they sit at different places on the network and take various measurements to extrapolate cloud application performance metrics. One tool may look at end-user response time, while another examines the number of packets pushed out from a server. Tools may run tests every 15 minutes or every minute, so making an apples-to-apples compari son can be difficult. And, even with limiting what performance metrics the tools test, results can become extremely complex. To make sense of this, third-party cloud-tool vendors need to build sophisticated analytic features into their sys-tems. The process is more art (best guess) than science (definite correlation). Consequently, tool vendors don’t guaran-tee a customer’s application will perform in a certain manner within your cloud provider’s infrastructure. Instead, the benchmarks merely provide guidelines. In the end, enterprise IT is responsible for fine-tuning these services to meet their performance criteria. In addition, cloud networks change dynami-cally and quite drastically depending on how much information flows over the Internet. As a result, it can be difficult to mimic the circum-stances leading to a performance problem. This turns troubleshooting into a task that can drain IT resources and drag out for days, weeks or even months. Because cloud app performance tools are complex, they are geared more toward large enterprises than small businesses. The moni-toring tools have various usage-based pricing models that can be difficult for some smaller companies to justify. As cloud computing use continues to emerge within the enterprise, IT teams understand the need to carefully monitor application perfor-mance. While various cloud app performance tools and services are available, they’re not a panacea. —Paul Korzeniowski

Tool vendors don’t guarantee a

customer’s application will perform

in a certain manner within your

cloud provider’s infrastructure.

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TOM NOLLE is president of CIMI Corp., a strategic con-sulting firm specializing in telecommunications and data communications since 1982.

BETH PARISEAU is a senior news writer for

SearchCloud-Computing.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com. Follow her @PariseauTT on Twitter.

PAUL KORZENIOWSKI is a freelance writer who special-izes in cloud computing issues. He can be reached at paulkorzen@aol.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Migrating Applications to the Cloud

is a SearchCloudComputing.com e-publication.

Margie Semilof | Editorial Director

Lauren Horwitz | Executive Editor

Phil Sweeney | Managing Editor

Eugene Demaitre | Associate Managing Editor

Laura Aberle | Associate Features Editor

Linda Koury | Director of Online Design

Neva Maniscalco | Graphic Designer

Rebecca Kitchens | Publisher

rkitchens@techtarget.com TechTarget 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com © 2013 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or re-produced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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