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12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

September 10, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

Cloud migration best practices

The “cloud is becoming more complicated,” it was the first statement in an hour-long webinar detailing the changes and opportunities with the boom in cloud computing and cloud migration. The presenter continued with an outline of cloud related things that traditional IT is now facing in their journey to AWS, Azure, GCP or other providers.

There were nine areas that surfaced as complications in the traditional transition to cloud:

Definitions
Pricing
Networking
Security
Users, Roles, and Profiles
Applications and Licensing
Services and Support
Availability
Backups

As VP of Customer Experience for SIOS Technology Corp I’ve seen how the following areas can impact a transition to cloud. To mitigate these complications, consumers are turning to managed service providers, cloud solution architects, contractors and consultants, and a bevy of related services, guides, blog posts and related articles. Often in the process of turning to outside or outsourced resources the complications to cloud are not entirely removed. Instead, companies and the teams they have employed to assist or to transition them to cloud still encounter roadblocks, speed bumps, hiccups and setbacks.

Most often these complications and slowdowns in migrating to the cloud come from twelve unanswered questions:

What are our goals for moving to the cloud?
What is your current on-premise architecture? Do you have a document, list, flow chart, or cookbook?
Are all of your application, database, availability and related vendors supported on your target cloud provider platform?
What are your current on-premises risks and limitations? What applications are unprotected, what are the most common issues faced on-premises?
Who is responsible for the cloud architecture and design? How will this architecture and design account for your current definitions and the definitions of the cloud provider?
Who are the key stakeholders, and what are their milestones, business drivers, and deadlines for the business project?
Have you shared your project plan and milestones with your vendors?
What are the current processes, governance, and business requirements?
What is the migration budget and does it include staff augmentation, training, and services? What are your estimates for ongoing maintenance, licensing, and operating expenses?
What are your team’s existing skills and responsibilities?
Who will be responsible for updating governance, processes, new cloud models, and the various traditional roles and responsibilities?
What are the applications, services, or functions that will move from IaaS to SaaS models?

Know Your Goals for the Cloud

So, how will answering these twelve questions will improve your cloud migration. As you can see from the questions, understanding your goals for the cloud is the first, and most important step. It is nearly universally accepted that “a cloud service provider such as AWS, Azure, or Google can provide the servers, storage, and communications resources that a particular application will require,” but for many customers, this only eliminates “he need for computer hardware and personnel to manage that hardware.” Because of this fact, often customers are focused on equipment or data center consolidation or reduction, without considering that there are additional cloud opportunities and gaps that they still need to consider. For example, cloud does eliminate management of hardware, but it “does not eliminate all the needs that an application and its dependencies will have for monitoring and recovery,” so if your goal was to get all your availability from the cloud, you may not reach that goal, or it may require more than just moving on premises to an IaaS model. Knowing your goals will go a long way in helping you map out your cloud journey.

Know Your Current On-Premises Architecture

A second critical category of questions needed for a proper migration to the cloud, (or any new platform) is understanding the current on-premises architecture. This step not only helps with the identification of your critical applications that need availability, but also their underlying dependencies, and any changes required for those applications, databases, and backup solutions based on the storage, networking, and compute changes of the cloud. Answering this question is also a key step in assessing the readiness of your applications and solutions for the cloud and quantifying your current risks.

A third area that will greatly benefit from working through these questions occurs when you discuss and quantify current limitations. Frequently, we see this phase of discovery opening the door to limitations of current solutions that do not exist in the cloud. For example, recently our services team worked with a customer impacted by performance issues in their SQL database cluster. A SIOS expert assisting with their migration inquired about the solution and architecture, and VM sizing decisions. After a few moments, a larger more application sized instance was deployed correcting limitations that the customer had accepted due to their on-premise restrictions on compute, memory, and storage. Similarly we have worked with customers who were storage sensitive. They would run applications with smaller disks and a frequent resizing policy, due to disk capacity constraints. While storage costs should be considered, running with minimal margins can become a limitation of the past.

Understand Business and Governance Changes

The final group of questions help your team understand schedules, business impacts, deadlines, and governance changes that need to be updated or replaced because they may no longer apply in the cloud. Migrating to the cloud can be a smooth transition and journey. However, failing to assess where you are on the journey and when you need to complete the journey can make it into a nightmare. Understanding timing is important and can be keenly aided by considering stakeholders, application vendors, business milestones, and business seasons. Selfishly, SIOS Technology Corp. wants customers to understand their milestones because as a Service provider it minimizes the surprises. But, we also encourage customers to answer these questions as they often uncover misalignment between departments and stakeholders. The DBAs believes that the cutover will happen on the last weekend of the month, but Finance is intent on closing the books over the final weekend of the same month; or the IT team believes that cutover can happen on Monday, but the applications team is unavailable until Wednesday, and perhaps most importantly the legal team hasn’t combed through the list of new NDAs, agreements, licensing, and governance changes necessary to pull it all together.

As customers work through the questions, with safety and empathy, what often emerges is a puzzle of pieces, ownership, processes, and decision makers that needs to be put back together using the cloud provider box top and honest conversations on budget, staffing, training, and services. The end result may not be a flawless migration, but it will definitely be a successful migration.

For help with your cloud migration strategy and high availability implementation, contact SIOS Technology Corp.

– Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Learn more about common cloud migration challenges.

Read about some misconceptions about availability in the cloud.

Reproduced from SIOS

Migrating Applications To The Cloud

August 29, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Migrating Applications To The Cloud

How do we get there?

In your journey to the cloud and higher availability, consider the advice of author and entrepreneur Nilofer Merchant (having the one link below is fine).

In less than 72 hours, I’ve answered the same question multiple times: How do you get there? It started with one of my older daughters asking me how to get to a school-related appointment, followed by a younger child asking me what route we were taking to a store, and finally my oldest daughter asking me how to get to a particular destination somewhere in the state. They all asked the same question. But in each case, the context of the question and the expected answer was very different. As author and entrepreneur Nilofer Merchant says, a lot about the answer to the question ‘how do you get there?’ depends not only on your there, but also on your here.

What is your “here” with current applications?

The first step in figuring out how to move your application there (to the cloud, or to higher availability in the cloud) is to name “here” correctly. So, what’s your “here”? Your answer to this question can be as varied as the locations in my conversations with my daughters. One of my daughters asked from the context of our house. Another’s context was from a starting point in a different state, and the youngest was asking from a place of theory (hoping that we’d get milkshakes).

As you consider your definition and the details of “here” start by asking some basic questions:

What are your critical applications, and how are they protected?
Where are you in your deployment of high availability protection for your application?
How is your critical data protected?
What is the size of your current team?
How confident are you in your solutions and services for protecting your application and data?
Where are your critical enterprise systems and application workloads currently running?
If you are on-premises, is that an on-premises server, or virtual machine? Or is here a private cloud, or public cloud without HA?
What is your budget for the move to the cloud and for managing your application in the cloud moving forward?
What weariness, uncertainty, uneasiness, or dissatisfaction do you feel “here”?

Defining “here” is the starting point, which helps us feel our way towards a better “there,” so take your time. Think about what else shapes, defines, restricts, or exists within the parameters of your “here”? Is “here” a multi-product deployment, global IT Team infrastructure, or some other multiple location, multiple office arrangement? Are your teams globally distributed, outsourced, or a combination? If you looked at your “here” what things stand out, what are your team, company, product, or enterprise markers? What are the key and commonly recurring pain points, such as lack of training, missing redundancy, incomplete architecture guides, disappointment with the incumbent solutions, cloud complexity,

What’s your “there”? Private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud?

After you have figured out your “here”, the second step to lift from Merchant’s article is “figuring out what ‘there’ might be. As VP of Customer Experience, I have worked with a number of customers who want a “there” to be an environment with zero downtime, planned or unplanned, or one in which application failovers are seamless and complete within two minutes or less. Other customers have less lofty goals, seeking downtime that fits within a five (5) to nine (9) minute window, or who prefer longer windows with options for manual overrides based on responses to failure notifications. Still other customers want a “there” with better notifications, clear resolutions and recommendations, application-specific orchestration, and a way to augment their teams with experts from vendors and partners. So what are the key features of your ‘there’? What can you afford?

When you look over the painstaking answers of “here,” what stood out? What items from “here” need to be addressed to create a more desirable future version of your team, enterprise, availability, datacenter, and life. Does your “there” include more resiliency and redundancy, more application orchestration, better analytics, or lower costs? Where does private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud figure into your “there”? How does your “here” improve because you have made it to “there.”

From “here” to “there”

The final step, according to Merchant, is “figuring the way we get from ‘here’ to ‘there’. If it is hard to be in your “here”, it only makes sense to put in the work to think about what “there” could be. In other words, think beyond simply moving your application to the cloud. Consider the resources and services you’ll need to create a result that meets all of your expectations. Think about the vendors, solution providers, services teams, and companies that specialize in purpose-built high availability solutions can help you get “there”.

Unlike my daughter’s “there”, there is no Waze for plotting a journey from “here” to “there” or cloud migrations. However, by carefully thinking through both your current situation, including your pains, frustrations, budget limitations, and your desired outcome, you can arrive at a solution that is more than a simple cloud migration. It can mean a more gratifying daily experience unencumbered by the fear of application failure and downtime and the hassle of troubleshooting and end-user complaints.

Taking Merchant’s advice when planning an application migration to the cloud can lead you to a wide range of possibilities from defining a more robust architecture, changing HA software solutions, engaging in services providers, moving to a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or other cloud model. It might even mean moving back to using your own datacenter.

For more than 20 years, SIOS has been helping companies implement high availability and disaster recovery protection for critical applications on premises, in the cloud and hybrid cloud environments. We can provide the expertise to help you through your application HA and DR journey from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and beyond. For more information, contact SIOS

– Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS

How To Extend Your Existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance To The Cloud For Disaster Recovery

June 17, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How To Extend Your Existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance To The Cloud For Disaster Recovery

Typically I point them to this DataKeeper documentation when someone asks me how to do extend existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance to the Cloud for Disaster Recovery.

This first document talks about extending the cluster and adding a 3rd node to the existing cluster. That’s fine if your cluster supports three nodes. But if you are using SQL Server Standard Edition, Microsoft limits you to a 2-node cluster. In the case of a 2-node cluster. you can still replicate to a 3rd node. Bear in mind the recovery will be more of a manual process. This process is described here.

People typically read these instructions and get a little worried. They feel like they would be performing open heart surgery on their cluster. It really is more like changing your shirt! You are simply replacing the Cluster Disk resource with a DataKeeper Volume resource. As you’ll see in the video below the process takes just a few seconds.

The code demonstrated in the video is show below.

Stop-ClusterGroup SQLServerGroup
Remove-ClusterResource -Name "Cluster Disk 1"
Set-Disk -Number 4 -IsOffline $False
Set-Disk -Number 4 -IsReadOnly $False
Import-Module -Name Storage
Set-Partition -DiskNumber 4 
-PartitionNumber 1 -NewDriveLetter X
New-DataKeeperMirror -SourceIP 10.0.2.100 
-SourceVolume X -TargetIP 10.0.1.10 -TargetVolume X -SyncType Sync
New-DataKeeperJob -JobName "x drive" 
-JobDescription "sql data" -Node1Name primary.datakeeper.local 
-Node1IP 10.0.2.100 -Node1Volume x 
-Node2Name dr.datakeeper.local -Node2IP 10.0.1.10 
-Node2Volume X -SyncType Sync
Add-ClusterResource -Name "DataKeeper Volume X" 
-ResourceType "DataKeeper Volume" -Group "SQLServerGroup"
Get-ClusterResource "DataKeeper Volume X" | Set-ClusterParameter 
VolumeLetter X
Get-ClusterResource -Name 'SQLServer' | Add-ClusterResourceDependency 
-Provider 'DataKeeper Volume X'
Start-ClusterGroup SQLServerGroup

After you run that code don’t forget you also need to click on Manage Shared Volumes to add the backup node to the DataKeeper job as shown in the video.

If you have SQL Server Enterprise Edition then the final step would be to install SQL Server in the DR node and choose add node to existing cluster.

If you are using SQL Server Standard Edition then your job is done. You would simply follow these instructions to access you data on the 3rd node and then mount the replicated databases.

These directions are applicable whether your DR node is in the Cloud or your own DR site.

Cloud Availability: The Biggest Trap of 2021

April 12, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Cloud Availability: The Biggest Trap of 2021

Author Carey Nieuwhof hooked me with a blog topic of the biggest trap for 2021. While not directly speaking to HA, the topic alone made me reflect on some of the trends of 2020. Cloud innovations are numerous and begin at the most fundamental levels of the infrastructure. Not to mention advances in AI, machine learning, compute capacity and algorithms, memory management and sharing, and a battery of others. All of these advances add up to making the current generation cloud the most robust, reliable and available data center. These centers, optimized with redundant power, cooling, a legion of IoT devices for monitoring and alerting, redundant networking, high speed interconnects, massive servers, storage, and disks are impressive– and quite possibly the biggest trap that may be looming in 2021.

The biggest trap of 2021 will be believing that cloud availability alone is the same as or enough for higher availability. This is a complex trap to dissect. The list of named advances that make up the backbone of many data centers is indeed vast and impressive, and it is only a fraction of the technological innovations that exist driving the cloud. So, what makes this massively redundant, high capacity, and AI driven infrastructure a trap? Namely, that hardware and infrastructure availability still leave your enterprise at risk.

The Top Risks of Cloud High Availability

Disks

Disks have gotten faster and more intelligent. New eye-popping advances in chip sets, access technology, manufacturing, storage capacity and raid technology means that cloud vendors are able to put up gaudy numbers for speed, access, and redundancy. This reduces the risk for single points of failure (SPOF’s) for the disk infrastructure and provides confidence that a single disk, or even a momentary loss of power to the disks will not cause a lack of availability.

Storage Arrays

The storage arrays and enclosures housed within the data center providing access to the disks have also greatly improved. No longer the big eye soar of blinking lights and Airboat sized fans, these units are small in size but loaded with capacity and performance enhancements. You’ll be hard pressed to find a modern chassis that isn’t built with redundant power, redundant disk capabilities, and able to provide near zero replication between connected storage units, even between units that are dispersed at greater distances. In addition these units have added the benefits of AI to predict failures, proactively resolve problems, and optimize workloads to reduce performance bottlenecks.

Servers

Remember when it seemed so long ago that big name manufacturers and tech prognosticators were predicting game changing technology that would reshape the landscape of the future. It seems like decades ago when people were predicting server technology advances such as: reduced footprint, faster more complex chipsets, NVMe, battery efficiencies, cooling advances, storage advancements, in-memory and persistent memory advances, GPUs and bare metal provisioning. That future has arrived and been surpassed. Servers are now accelerating the pace of cloud computing capabilities and increasing the ability of the cloud to promote redundancy, reliability and robustness.

Networking

Advances in the networking solutions, tools, software and equipment also make the list of things that make cloud availability stronger in 2020. Over the last few years, vendors have released solutions that have expanded the speed, possible topologies, capacities and distance capabilities of inter- and intra- cloud networks. Like so many other technologies, vendors are automating traffic flow and patterns using AI and Machine Learning, taking advantage of advances in manufacturing to build in device redundancy that can be leveraged for availability and reliability.

Applications

Applications are still a vulnerable part of the cloud architecture when left unprotected. Applications that are not protected by an application aware higher availability module or framework, or SIOS Application Recovery Kit (ARK) run the risk of being down at the most critical time or moment in your business lifecycle. A SIOS ARK provides the application in the cloud with critical application aware monitoring and recovery, as well as failover and disaster recovery orchestration in the event of a failure.

Databases

While numbers of databases have increased their robustness, and some have even jumped in to offer replication enhancements, these databases are still a risk on their own. Databases with replication technology still need orchestration, automation, and the intelligence to make sure that they are highly available to the application components that need them. What good is it if your database continues to hum along in your primary Region and Availability Zone, if your application has actually failed to a different Region or DR site. Supplement databases with replication, such as the SAP HANA database, with the automation and best practices of the SIOS Technology Corp HANA ARK and the SAP certified SAP S/4 HANA ARK. Protect databases that do not have replication technology, or whose technology is limited with the combination of the SIOS Protection Suite, SIOS DataKeeper for Linux and the associated ARK.

Storage

In the realm of disks and storage it can be intriguing to believe that the capacity, redundancy of software and hardware raid mean that you are highly available. However, storage is only available if it is accessible to the applications and Virtual Machines that need them. What technology do you have deployed to monitor and recover mounted cloud shares and volumes such as EFS and ANF. An unplanned downtime and its associated chaos can be as near as an unintended unmount, or offline operation by a well-intentioned user.

Virtual Machines

Hypervisor technology has made your virtual machine push button easy. Integrated cloud solutions promise to monitor if the VM is available and provide options such as restart or migrate. These solutions are not enough to cover issues with your Virtual Machine that may stall, delay, or degrade your availability. In addition to what your cloud vendor provides, you need a monitoring and availability solution that understands how to monitor the VM health such as:

Disk capacity.
CPU deadlocks
Memory contention and errors
Resource exhaustion

A VM that runs without the ability to process applications requests may escape the eye of your cloud only monitoring, but shouldn’t escape the watchful monitoring of your higher availability solution.

Data Center

Let’s get real for a moment. All the advances in data center availability, redundancy and reliability does not negate the need for eliminating your data center as a single point of failure (SPOF). As VP of Customer Experience, we have worked with a customer who deployed best in class redundancy within the private cloud data center, much like the major public cloud vendors. And if not for the high availability and data replication solution provided by SIOS Technology Corp, this customer would have experienced major downtime when a tropical storm ripped through their area taking out power, backup generators, cooling, and networking.

However, with SIOS Technology, the customer was able to preemptively failover ahead of the storm to a data center more inland. Cooling failures, construction mishaps, as well as human and natural disasters are continual reminders that a single data center isn’t the same as higher availability.

Don’t fall into the biggest trap of 2021. Make sure you have true high availability by avoiding thinking the cloud has you covered.

– Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS

Cloud Migration Best Practices for High Availability

March 25, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Cloud Migration Best Practices for High Availability

In 2020 we have seen more enterprises migrating more of their mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases to the cloud. However, not all of these migrations have been smooth. I have personally witnessed cloud migration projects dramatically slowed and even stopped due to a lack of planning for application availability, the complexity of retrofitting ‘DIY High Availability’, misunderstanding related to what a ‘lift and shift’ entails and unexpected costs.

There are a number of best practices, cloud checklists, and other ways for organizations to prepare for the cloud. The following best practices should be factored into every migration strategy for high availability clustering for those who have either hit pause on their 2020 cloud migration, or plan to forge ahead in 2021.

Cloud Migration Best Practices

Gather the requirements

Many organizations moving to the cloud think that the cloud is an on-premises architecture moved to the cloud. This misunderstanding in cloud migration often leads to stalls and delays when networking, storage, disk speeds, and system sizes for on-premises collide with the cloud reality. A smoother transition to cloud begins by gathering the real requirements for the infrastructure, governance and compliance, security, sizing, and related controls and resources.

Design and Document

In the design phase, the architecture of on-premises environments is mapped to the cloud environment that has been chosen for maximum availability and thoroughly documented. In this phase, as the architecture takes shape and you identify the strategy for IPs, load balancers, IOPS, and data availability. Teams need to look at how availability native to the cloud needs to be augmented with a robust application and infrastructure availability solution capable of automating complexities of the cloud. At SIOS, our experts in AWS and Azure clustering and availability work with customers to swap on-premises NFS for AWS EFS, Azure ANF, or a standalone NFS cluster tier. Additionally, a key part of the successful implementation in this phase will be documenting everything. Documentation is an often-neglected, but essential element of migration success.

Plan for High Availability

Achieving high availability in the cloud requires understanding the requirements, creating the design, and documenting a plan that lays out a strategy for achieving those requirements. A basic plan should include staffing, staff training, deploying a QA system testing, pre-production steps, deployment, post deployment validation, and on-going iterations. The best outcomes for cloud migration arise from a deliberate, planned process; not an ad hoc, break-fix approach.

Staff

How well is your team staffed for the cloud migration? Traditional help desk, client/server IT, or IT teams may not be enough for the cloud migration. If your team is new to the cloud, it may be time to consider adding more resources or professional services-based solutions. Migrating to the cloud can be taxing, tedious, and difficult without the proper insight, information, or training. Does your staff need to incorporate training related to the cloud environment? And while you are looking into training and professional services to assist your IT team, check with your vendor for training related to the availability solution. Many vendors provide flexible training for the HA solution and cloud training can be obtained with the cloud vendors or popular sites such as Udemy.

Deploy QA

The QA deployment phase is the phase in which the team executes the plans for deploying the actual systems into the cloud. Successful deployment teams validate their plans and strategy, understand the data migration process, uncover any missing dependencies, and prepare for the next step in the process, especially testing. When this step is skipped or skimped on, the once-promising migrations often stall or fail. When you reach the QA system deployment phase, your team will do the heavy lifting of the initial migration and configuration of the applications, databases, and critical data in the cloud.

Test Your High Availability

Testing in your QA environment is a critical step. These tests are not a waste of time; they are a time saver. Deploying environments in the cloud is often easier than deploying on-premises. Your QA environment can be scripted with tools like Ansible, deployed quickly as templates from the cloud marketplace or a cloned image, or deployed and built from cloud formation templates. Once deployed, disaster scenarios can be ironed out and optimized before a disaster, not in them. Test scenarios can be leveraged to identify overprovisioning, under-provisioning or bottlenecks with networking or disk speeds. A full test scenario can also be used as a part of an on-boarding strategy for new staff. Additionally, testing should be performed on snapshots and backups as well.

Deploy Production

When the testing phase completes, and your team has validated the test results, the next phase is to move from QA to pre-production, and from pre-production to go-live. The testing phase is the last phase of the heavy lifting involving final user acceptance testing, a final cutover and update of the production data, and then the users.

Review, Revise, and Repeat

A successful migration does not end once you reach the go-live phase, but continues through the lifecycle phases. In the post go-live phase of the cloud migration strategy, your team continues to review, revise, and repeat the steps from ‘Gather’ through ‘Deploy Production’. In fact, your team should repeat this process again and again, based on requirements specific to releases, application updates, security updates, related system maintenance, operating system versions, disaster recovery planning, as well as the requirements from your high availability vendor’s own best practices. The cloud platform is always evolving and adding new features, functionality, and updates that can enhance your existing HA solution and architecture. Reviewing, revising, and repeating the process will be a necessary step in successful onboarding.

In 2021 we’ll see more enterprises migrating more mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases to the cloud. A key major factor in their success will be utilizing cloud migration best practices to avoid delays and failures throughout the process. Understanding your business requirements and needs, documenting the design and plan, deploying in a QA environment with purpose built clustering solutions, and executing extensive testing before go-live will be essential. Contact SIOS Technology to understand how the SIOS Protection Suite can be included in your thoughtful cloud migration best practices.

-Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS