A step-by-step guide to an application migration process
Learn about a proven iterative application migration process that Maxima Consulting’s cloud migration engineers follow to always deliver migration projects on time and within set budgets.
Strongly focused on optimizing efficiency and costs for our clients, our migration process involves creating a seamless, automated migration flow that streamlines the onboarding process and makes migrating workloads easier for everyone involved.
Read this article to learn about our process, discover the application migration best practices we follow, and unlock a successful cloud migration with consistent outcomes and shorter timeframes across all cloud platforms.
Overview of our application migration strategy
Your migration project can take various forms, as any number of your apps may necessitate a different approach (such as rehosting, replatforming, repurchasing, refactoring, retiring, or retaining).
Categorizing your apps, assessing their criticality, and understanding the relationships between them forms a stable foundation for the migration process, which fosters optimized costs and minimizes risks and disruptions.
However, every migration strategy follows similar steps that you can learn about below, regardless of the specific adjustments your existing applications necessitate.
Eight steps to a successful application migration
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Step 1: Application migration planning process and initial configuration
During the planning stage, our migration team collaborates with your internal teams to plan your cloud migration and establish an action plan to successfully migrate all your applications and data to your chosen cloud provider.
Depending on the cloud service provider(s) you use, the number of applications that require cloud migration, their type and size, and the dependencies necessitating a simultaneous migration process, our cloud migration experts assign an appropriate category and priority to each application.
Based on that information, our team can take your existing IT ecosystem into account when developing a detailed migration strategy that contains milestones, weekly tasks, and deadlines for the migration project.
This cloud strategy is then submitted to stakeholders in your organization and finalized after the feedback process. Proper planning enables us to apply best practices for application migration throughout the process, facilitating the entire cloud migration journey for our clients.
Based on a collaboratively developed strategy, our expert cloud team can commence with setting up our Cloud Orbit platform, which enables us to utilize pre-built templates and out-of-the-box technology stacks to streamline the creation and optimization of your new cloud computing environments, including production and test environments.
Step 2: Software ecosystem discovery
During the discovery phase, our migration engineers meticulously examine, document, and catalog the various components of your application ecosystem. This step involves the application rationalization process, which is necessary for achieving cost savings and operational efficiency.
To achieve these benefits, our experts collaborate with your in-house software development and operations teams to streamline processes, eliminate redundancies, and reduce the number of applications.
Step 3: Application architecture technical review
After the discovery phase is concluded, Maxima Consulting’s cloud migration engineers conduct a thorough technical examination of the inner workings of your current software architecture. From analyzing the logical and physical aspects of your applications to assessing the severity of encountered roadblocks, our experts leave no stone unturned.
As a result, our team develops a definite application migration roadmap and a detailed technical review report that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of your current architecture.
Step 4: Migration tools selection and customization
After the technical review, our application migration experts proceed to develop an optimized deployment model. By scrutinizing application components to uncover the best options for efficient configuration and improved resilience, they can select the most suitable deployment templates and create a precise deployment manifest.
As with everything else we do, this step is also well documented and recorded in the Git repository.
Step 5: Creating an automated application migration pipeline
Our automated pipeline is designed to streamline the entire application migration process. It retrieves the manifest from a Git repository and, based on that, creates a dynamic pipeline complete with a container image, Kubernetes manifest, configuration, and other necessary items for a seamless deployment process.
This entire process, unique to Maxima Consulting’s Cloud Orbit platform, is fully transparent and logged through the built-in observability dashboard, ensuring a seamless experience for clients from start to finish.
Step 6: Testing and review
The automated pipeline concludes by deploying your application workloads within the test environment based on Kubernetes. The entire process is seamless and efficient, following best practices and established standards.
After deployment, our expert team collaborates with your in-house teams to thoroughly inspect the application running on Kubernetes. We document and resolve all detected issues and provide best-in-class monitoring tools to address any concerns that may arise.
Our team continues this process until the application deployment is confirmed to fulfill all the functional and performance requirements specified by your technology teams.
Step 7: Production environment launch
Once the workload is tested in the QA environment, the following steps are to assess its production readiness and develop a plan to move it to production. After thoroughly testing the application’s functionality and performance, our team develops a rollout plan to ensure a smooth launch. Then, stakeholders within your organization review the release plan. After they green-light the plan, your application goes live in the new production environment.
Important note: Clients who already have an enterprise-ready, auditable CI/CD in place can opt out of using our Cloud Orbit platform and continue to use their existing pipeline.
Step 8: Post-migration activities
After the rollout, our migration experts conduct a walkthrough of the observability dashboard and its features for your internal teams to ensure the platform continues to operate seamlessly, providing the application team with a hassle-free experience.
While the migration process is self-contained and designed to allow our clients to avoid vendor lock-in (and, if they wish, run the migrated application entirely on their own), continuous usage of our platform facilitates simplified performance optimization for the migrated application, enhancing its scalability and reliability.
Pros and cons of using our platform post-migration
Pros
- Approach based on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) best practices
- High availability and continuous performance optimization
- Insights into cost-saving opportunities
- Best-in-class observability dashboard
- Unlimited expert support
Cons
- Slightly less operational independence
- May necessitate additional configuration to achieve full compatibility with your other IT systems
The importance of a tailored application migration strategy
As mentioned earlier, when developing your app migration strategy, it is crucial to consider your organization’s unique situation, its existing infrastructure, software dependencies, and other factors specific to your current IT ecosystem.
Examining your systems enables Maxima Consulting’s migration specialists to identify your strengths and quick wins, while also recognizing the challenges and adjusting the plan to overcome them.
As a result, the individual approach to each migration project allows our expert teams to optimize your new cloud environments’ performance, enable significant cost savings, address potential issues ahead of time, and fully unlock all benefits of cloud computing for your organization.
Contact us today and enjoy a successful application migration in record time.
