"CIO's Guide to Application Migration" - Key points

Key points from CIO's Guide to Application Migration (Google Cloud Whitepaper, May 2020) -

A well-designed digital transformation strategy should do much more than keep you competitive...instead, it should position you to excel by untethering IT staff from low value, labor-intensive tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation and high-impact projects. 

Digital transformation is truly an exercise in change management, requiring determined effort and focused leadership across people, process and technology domains; it is as much a culture shift as a technology revamp. 

While some licenses allow you to deploy an application in a cloud environment, others explicitly forbid cloud deployment. In addition, some licenses (like for Oracle software) are assigned based on the number of CPUs or sockets in use, and these concepts might not be applicable when running on cloud technology.

If retention on-premises is no longer viable (e.g. if you must completely shut down your datacenter) or if you want to increase proximity to cloud resources, then taking advantage of Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution, or shifting to a colocation facility (colo) adjacent to the appropriate cloud region are recommended alternatives.

...when leveraged within the Anthos platform, Google managed containers can deliver application and workload portability across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. If a hybrid or multi-cloud approach aligns with your strategic goals, we recommend adopting Anthos. With Anthos, you can achieve a unified view of all GKE managed environments, thus simplifying global application management.

Google recommends using Migrate for Anthos to lower the complexity of converting VMs into containers.

As you attain familiarity with containers, cloud, and Kubernetes, we recommend that you eventually  consider refactoring your application stack to adopt a microservices architecture as a next step in your transformation journey. 

If your existing environment is VMware-based, and you prefer to minimize change to your current operations, Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) is a managed VMware-as-a-Service offering purpose-built for “lift and shift” migration of VMware workloads on Google Cloud. 

GCVE enables enterprise customers to run VMware virtual machines natively in a dedicated, private Software Defined Data Center within Google Cloud. This allows customers to move VMware from on-premises to Google Cloud with no customer changes to tools, processes, policies, or ecosystem integrated solutions. This new service allows our customers to run VMware vSphere-based workloads in Google Cloud, while also benefiting from Google Cloud's unique strengths...Users will retain full, native access to the VMware stack including vCenter, vSAN and NSX.

Google Cloud's Bare Metal Solution provides certified infrastructure for migrating Oracle-based workloads while supporting high availability with Oracle RAC & any Oracle versions.

Click image for enlarged view

The patterns suggested in this flowchart from "CIO's Guide to Application Migration" can be used to extrapolate similar services for other public cloud providers.

Also see: Questions to ask while planning for Cloud Migration