Cloud Migration won’t happen overnight

There is a massive difference between migrating some code to the cloud and migrating an entire application to the cloud. Yes, the heart of any application is indeed its codebase, but code can’t execute without data and there lies the biggest challenge of any cloud migration. “No problem,” you say. “We can just move our database to the cloud and our code will be able to access it.” Sounds great, apart from most storage services in the cloud tend to run on cheap disk which is often virtualized and shared across several tenants. It’s no secret that databases store and access data from disk; the problem these days is that disks have got bigger and cheaper, but they haven’t exactly got much faster. The assumption that Cloud will offer your application a better Quality of Service (QoS) at a cheaper price is therefore not always true when you include application tiers that manage data. Your code might run faster with cheaper and elastic computing power, but it can only go as fast as the data which it retrieves and processes.

Applications were failing long before Cloud came along

I’m fed up of reading about Cloud outages, largely because all applications are created and managed by the most dangerous species on the planet – the human being. Failure is inevitable in regards to everything the human being creates or touches, and for this reason alone I see no news in seeing the word “outage” in IT articles with or without Cloud mentioned.

What gets me the most is that applications, infra-structure and data centers were slowing down and blowing up long before “Clouds” became fashionable. They just didn’t make the news every other week when applications resided in “data-centers”–ah, the good old days. Just ask anyone who works in operations or help desk/app support whether they’ve worked a 38 hour week; I guess the vast majority will either laugh or slap you. If everything worked according to plan, IT would be a really dull place to work, help desk would be replaced with OK desk, and we’d have nothing to talk about in the office or pub.