Stefan Johner

Assessment Guide for Public Cloud Workloads

Posted on Mar 7, 2016

According to Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business the Cloud Computing hype seems to be over and we are entering the phase of disillusionment.

However when speaking with IT people about Public Cloud, most of the time they are pretty enthusiastic about this whole new level of elasticity which is possible when running workloads on a Public Cloud. But on the other hand people are concerned about security, privacy and legal restrictions when using the Public Cloud. Given the recent issues with the U.S.-EU Safe-Harbor framework, companies may be forced to (re-)think their cloud strategy.

Companies have to choose wisely, which applications they run on a Public Cloud. Applications which benefit from being run in a Public Cloud are sometimes not that easy to find. One has to consider legal restrictions and risks in terms of security when thinking about migrating an application to a Public Cloud.

There is plenty of literature out there which describes how to migrate applications to a Public Cloud. But sometimes all these papers and guides are just not that easy to understand. Below you find a list of interesting papers which are in my opinion definitively worth reading when dealing with migration of applications to a Public Cloud. If you have any other experiences or you may know other interesting papers please let me know in the comment section.

Since many customers and IT people probably do not have time to rifle through tons of scientific papers it tired to create kind of easy to read guidelines which hopefully help people to more easily understand what criteria have to be considered when thinking about migrating applications to a Public Cloud.

My work is based on a paper called Migrating Existing Applications to the Cloud: Roadmap for Success which was published by the Cloud Standards Customer Council back in 2003. I created kind of a fact sheet which should guide you through an assessment of a given application. Its more like a quick start guide and not a complete reference on how to adapt applications for Public Cloud. But I should give you a first impression about what to consider when thinking about migrating an application to a Public Cloud.

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For those of you interested in a complete PDF version of this infographic, please download it from Microsoft Technet Gallery. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know!

Download from Technet Gallery

I definitively recommend digging deeper into some of the above papers if you are interested in this topic. The Cloud Standards Customer Council also published couple of other deliverables regarding all different topics in Cloud Computing.

Also there are some software products and frameworks which claim to be able to check applications on their cloud readiness. I personally did not use any of them but you may want to check out the following links: