Efficient Scalable Migrations in the Cloud
Kolanuvada Mahendra Varma, Giruba Beulah · 2022
Cloud based migration centers around themes such as scalability, reduced expenditure, maintenance and security. Cloud computing services proffer the ability to spin up and spin down clusters based on the load, provide various version support, cloud native tools, hardware and software capabilities. However, cloud based migration pose securitychallenges due to reliance on multiple, potentially third partyclouds.Migration is of six types known as the 6Rs viz. a) Lift and shift, b) Refactoring, c) Re-platforming, d) Re-purchasing, e) Retiring and f) Retaining. In Lift and shift, one simply “liff”s or copies applications, workloads, or databases from on premises to the cloud with no changes. Refactoring is also known as rearchitecting, which usually deals with modifying applications. Based on resource consumption and business needs, refactoring is usually favoured along with the first approach, but this is time consuming and expensive compared to the former. In replatforming though, optimizations along with few infrastructure changes are done, to avail all the benefits of the respective target cloud offerings.In this paper, we discuss few migration use cases at Walmart, all centred around the second and the third migration strategies and discuss the solution approaches, which resulted in remarkable gains.