Migrating Enterprise Applications to the Cloud

1. Naveen Noel
Sr. Solutions Architect
(Sep 8th 2011)

2.  Introduction to ZSL
 Explore a clear definition for Cloud Computing
 Discuss ZSL’s 8-phased approach to Enterprise Application
Migration to the cloud.
 Cloud Services offered by ZSL
 Share 2 Case Studies

3.  Work out of Edison, NJ.
 Practice Lead of the Enterprise Computing Competency (IDEA Lab)
 Handle Cloud Computing Competency – Applications
 Pre-Sales and Projects
 Bring in new clients
 Key focus areas: Value Added R&D, Product Development, Product Engineering
 Have been working on Cloud Technologies since early 2007

4.  15+ years Global Technology Integrator & Business Solutions Provider,
Headquartered in Edison, NJ
 State-of-the-art Technology Research & Development Centers in US, Canada and
India
 4000 employees with offices in US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Malaysia,
Singapore, Middle-East and India
 Dedicated R&D Division to Offer Value Added R&D Services & Product
Development Services to the ISVs and SPs
 Emerging Technologies Specialization with the leading technology vendors
alignment
 Pioneer in Industry Solutions Development (Insurance, Finance, E-Governance,
Consumer Electronics, Pharmaceutical & Telecom)
 Award Winning & Proven Partnership Program “Get IT Together” Partnership for
ISVs, VARs, SPs and SIs
 ISO and CMM Certified Solution Provider

5. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a
definition:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand
network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources
(e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be
rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction.
In simple words: Flexible hosted resource pools delivered on the internet

6.  On-demand Self Service – Ready to use services; minimal intervention
from provider.
 Broad Network Access – Access wider network services.
 Resource Pooling – Pool resources on demand like Compute, Memory,
Storage/disk etc.
 Rapid Elasticity – Scale up and down, out and in with demand.
 Measured Service – Metered Usage & Billing – Pay as you go and only
for the what is used; “Opex vs. Capex.”
 Multi-tenant – Usually share the platforms with others; but not always.

7.  Public Cloud – External premises, multi-tenant, self-provisoned public
service over the internet offered by vendor, available to all. Utility
Computing Model.
 Private Cloud – Internal or external premises, single-tenant, tightly
controlled access.
 Hybrid Cloud – Combination of the above – some resources private,
others public; or public during heavy load, etc.
 Community Cloud – A cloud infrastructure shared by similar
organizations for mutual benefit. Popular with Universities and
Governments.

8. The challenges with migrating applications to a cloud infrastructure are plenty
and range from security, to SLA management, to regulations, to fear of vendor lock-in,
to lack of any standards.
Many businesses are looking for better ways to migrate their existing
applications to a Cloud-based infrastructure so that they can enjoy advantages seen
with the cloud like flexibility. It gives businesses the freedom of choice to choose the
programming models, languages, operating systems and databases they are already
using or familiar with. As a result, many organizations are moving existing applications
to the Cloud today and most applications, data or IT assets within an organization can
be moved to the Cloud today with minimal effort.
Application migration is the process of redeploying an application, typically on newer
platforms and infrastructure. The process involves the staging of the new environment
before the actual cutover and requires coordination of IT teams at the time of cutover.

9. 8.
Optimization
7.
Leveraging
6. Testing the Cloud
and Rollout
5. Data
Migration
4. Host and
Application
3. Design Migration
2. Proof of
Concept
1. Discovery
and
Assessment

10.  Need – We need to clearly identify the business Need for the ‘cloud’.
 Cloud Assessment questionnaire – ZSL sends out a Cloud assessment questionnaire which
helps in assessing the client’s specific cloud needs.
 On-site visit – Sometimes, an onsite visit and assessment may be required.
 Cloud Platform – Identifying the right cloud platform is very critical. Each cloud has a niche
and we find a way to exploit it.
 Security – Address security concerns. You own the data, decide geographic location,
encryption etc.
 Cloud Candidates– Identifying cloud candidates. Identifying cloud candidates. which
applications are typical candidates to move to the cloud and which are no.
 Classifying IT assets
◦ Applications with sensitive data.
◦ Applications with low, medium, high compliance requirements.
◦ Applications that are external facing, customer facing, internal only, partner facing.
◦ Applications with low, medium, high coupling.
◦ Applications with different licensing models.
 Licensing – Identifying licensing contracts for OS, products.
 Estimate – Ball-park estimate.
 Proposal – Submit proposal – subject to change.

11.  Suitability – Gauge suitability of the cloud provider. Which cloud
suits you the best?
 Identify Applications for POC – Identify few applications that
could be probable for a POC.
 Validate technology – Validate the latest and the greatest
technology
 Validate assumptions – Ensure that our assumptions regarding
the design of equivalent Cloud infrastructure are accurate.
 Verify estimates and costs – Verify your estimates and cost.
 Benchmarks – Perform necessary benchmarks and set
expectations.
 Identify bottlenecks – Identify bottlenecks and overcome them.

12.  Design for the cloud – The POC gives us a fairly good understanding of the design. Just
like all applications need to be designed before they are developed, similarly for
applications to work efficiently in the cloud, using cloud features, we need to first
design for the cloud? Be sure you fully understand the ‘cloud specific requirements’
before designing.
 Cloud Services – Understand different cloud services and value-add offered from a
specific cloud vendor. At the same time, the cloud is evolving, this comes with certain
limitations, consider them when designing.
 Technology Stack – Make sure you consider the technology stack (OS, Applications,
servers etc) before when designing. Each stack may require specific requirements.
 Work-around – If a specific feature/service is not available in the cloud, have a work-
around or try to leverage a different cloud and/or hybrid cloud. You may need to
develop some custom script/code.
 Design for failure – Design for failure and nothing will fail.
 Design for security – Data is private to us and we need to secure it. Based on your
security level, keep in mind cloud security services offered by the vendor and leverage it
when designing.
 Control Costs – Cloud costs can vary a lot, a best design will lower your costs a lot.

13.  Host to Virtual environment map – Map physical resources like RAM,
CPU, storage, network, RAID etc to equivalent virtual environments?
 Convert P2V and V2V – If feasible, identify and convert physical and
virtual hosts to virtual machine images supported by the cloud
provider. Use import images option from the cloud provider if required.
 Migrate VMs to the cloud – Migrate all the VMs to the cloud through
the internet or ship the disks to the cloud provider (if cloud provider
supports it).
 Manual Migration – If P2V or V2V is not feasible, then create the virtual
environment on the cloud, basically cloud specific images.
 Migrate applications – If P2V or V2V is not feasible, then install the
database(s), all applications like web servers, application servers, home
grown, third party into the cloud. There are 2 ways to do this.
 Forklift applications – Migrate all applications at once.
 Hybrid migration – phased it out, move applications in batches.
 Launch Instances, Create Images – If P2V or V2V was successful, then
launch equivalent instances and creates respective images specific to
the cloud provider.

14.  Identify data size – First, identify the data size to be migrated.
 Identify different RDBMS’s – Identifying the different RDBMS. (commercial and open
source) options available in the Cloud today.
 Effort estimation – Identifying the effort (in terms new development, one-off scripts)
required to migrate all the data to the Cloud.
 Trade-offs – Take right tradeoffs among various dimensions - cost, durability, query-
ability, availability, latency, performance (response time), relational (SQL joins), size of
object stored (large, small), accessibility, read heavy vs. write heavy, update frequency,
cache-ability, consistency (strict, eventual) and transience (short-lived).
 Identify and choose storage options – Identifying different storage options available in
the Cloud and choosing the best option. Options like data mirroring, replication etc
should be considered here.
 Prepare the cloud environment – Create the cloud environment. Options like data
mirroring, replication etc should be considered here.
 Data Migration – Consider your trade-offs and migrate the data from the datacenter to
the cloud through the internet or ship the disks to the cloud provider (if cloud provider
supports it).
 Verify data integrity – Check for data inconsistencies and ensure the migration is
successful.

15.  Testing – Test how the cloud is treating you. Check
applications, data, network to see if everything fits well.
 Cloud testing –
 Apart from normal application testing, cloud specific features like elasticity
(scale-up, scale-out), auto-scaling, network, BDR, etc., are tested to make
sure everything is working as per the requirement and expected.
 Other features – If there are any other vendor specific cloud features being
used, then employ the right tools to test these features out.

16.  Identify services – After migrating the applications to
the Cloud and running necessary tests, and analysis
confirms that everything is working as expected.
 Leverage benefits – It is advisable to invest time and
resources to determine how to leverage additional
benefits of the Cloud like auto scaling, edge caching
your static web content, auto-recovery and most
importantly, elasticity.
 BDR – Data has to be secure and safe. So, by leveraging
the cloud features implement a backup and disaster
recovery strategy.

17.  Under utilization – Terminate under-utilized virtual instances,
 Correct instance types – Use the correct instance types where
applicable. Using too large or too small instance types could cost you $.
 Spot and reserved instances – If Amazon cloud is platform of choice,
then explore options for spot and reserved instances.
 Usage Patterns – Understand usage patterns, find out better ways to
design, adapt it and improvise.
 New Features – Keep a continuous check on new features emerging
from the cloud vendor and see how you can leverage it.
 Application Performance – Improve efficiency of the application
architecture by implementing caching wherever applicable. Use the
caching service of the cloud if provided as a service.
 Monitoring – Monitor your cloud and its applications. Know whats
going on, fix anything if required. Deal with mis-behaving applications.

18.  Strategy Workshops – Study and review existing business direction and IT
strategy. Recommend future alignment of both with Cloud Computing
services.
 Readiness Assessments – Inventory, review and assess current IT applications,
policies and resources, and check readiness for migration to Cloud.
 Consulting – Consulting services to build, operate and manage Private and
Hybrid Clouds.
 Migration and Integration – Migrating applications to the Cloud. Legacy
modernization, integrating public cloud services with in-house apps and
services.
 Support Services – Supporting, managing and administering customer’s
infrastructure and applications in the Cloud.

19.  SmartPrise Cloud Business Continuity Suite – Cloud-based Backup,
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Services. Silver, Gold and
Platinum level services to serve organizations of varied sizes and with
varied requirements.
 SmartPrise Data Center as a Service – ZSL will “build” your next Data
Center in the Cloud. And we will provide the support, management
and administration to run it for you.
 SmartPrise Dev/Test Cloud – A Development and Test environment
that scale up and down according to demand. Performance, security
and automated testing from the Cloud.

21.  CRN Magazine names ZSL as one of the “30 Cloud VARs that GET
IT.”
 ZSL debuts in the Top 250 of InformationWeek 500 Top
Technology Innovators Across America in 2010
 SocNet wins NJTC’s 2010 Mid-Atlantic Technology Innovation
Award in the IT Industry Category
 PowerCube DaaS is recognized at IBM’s Lotus Awards 2010

22. Use Case
Application Migration, Application Scalability, reduced Infrastructure costs
Key Challenge
Our client, a leading Radio service provider, required 15+ applications
running across several servers to be migrated to the cloud with high
security. Reason for migration was scalability.
Our Solution
 Migrated all servers and 15+ applications to the OpSource cloud.
 Security provided with Virtual Private Cloud, VPN used to access
instances. Web Application security firewall installed and configured.
 Dynamic load balancing configured for upscaling and downscaling.
 CDN used to deliver content across all portals/applications.
 Business continuity DR setup.

23. Use Case
Application Scalability, Growing Infrastructure demands, availability.
Key Challenge
A leading online Media service provider, required ZSL to build and deploy a Video Player
application (similar to youtube.com) which could stream video and scale massively with high
security.
Our Solution
 Developed and deployed the application on amazon cloud using Amazon’s Elastic Compute
Service (EC2)
 Data (videos) stored on Amazon’s S3 Service
 Security provided with Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud, VPN used to access instances. Web
Application security firewall installed and configured
 Dynamic load balancing configured for upscaling and downscaling using Amazon’s ELB and
Auto Scaling
 CDN used to deliver content across all portals/applications using Amazon’s Cloud Front
Service
 Detailed Monitoring provided using Amazon’s Cloud Watch
 All emails are handled through Amazon’s SES Service
 Other Amazon services used: SQS, Route 53.
 Size: Portal currently services more than 200 clients with over 10000 videos streamed online.

26. www.zslinc.com | info@zslinc.com