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Migrating to SQL: Cloud Migration Strategies and Phases in Migration Journey (Ep. 1) | Data Exposed - read the full article about cloud migration, Cloud Consulting and Data migration, Cloud infrastructure management from Microsoft Developer on Qualified.One
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>> Youve been hearing a lot about migrating to the Cloud.
But what are the migration phases and what are the various strategies that real-world organizations have taken? Learn more in this episode of Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, Im Anna Hoffman and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today Im joined by Raj, a former manager on the Azure Data team.
Raj, thanks so much for joining us today.
>> Thank you so much Anna for your time.
Let me introduce myself.
My name is Raj Pochiraju and Im a Principal Program Manager in Nagios SQL.
My team score focuses to double up the database migration tools that really enable you a seamless SQL Server database migrations from your own premise system environments to Azure SQL.
>> Awesome. Its great to have you on the show and I believe were really kicking off a series.
Well link to the whole playlist in the description.
But Raj, before we get into deeper topics related to migrating to the Cloud, Id love to get your take on what is the migration strategy or process or is there standard guidance on how customers should think about this? >> Sure, I think at first I definitely want to talk about the various phases that are involved in the migration journey.
As you see on the screen, there are four different phases that customers really take when they take lead at the migration journey.
The very first phase is essentially you go on and discover your environment and then scan through your application portfolio and really understand which of those applications are ready to migrate to Cloud, and then which of these applications are a good fit for Software as a Service? Which applications are a good fit for infrastructure and platform as a service kind of stuff.
You do that analysis as part of the discovery and assessment phases.
You really also want to understand which of those applications that you really want to do.
A lift and shift migration also called as a rehost migration.
Depending on the effort that is being involved to do the migration and there are enough investment.
You really make some art picture and decisions to see whether you are going to be adopting a rehost migration or are you going to refactor some of your workloads to migrate to more modern platforms on the Cloud.
You make all those decisions in the phases like discovery and assessment phase.
Then after that, there is a phase called migrate phase where you start migrating your schema and then you are migrating your databases and as well as you are migrating any other artifacts that your applications are dependent on.
Then you also think about, how much migration downtime that you have and what type of migration method that you are going to be using so that you can really enable that migration to meet your migration downtime SLA numbers.
You adapt some of those tools that really help you to meet your migration needs as well.
As matter of fact, you also wants to understand is it onetime migration? Is it more of a coexistence migration that you want to make sure that both source databases and as well as the target databases are going to be having read and write operations at the same time? You would come and then do the migration cutover at some point of time.
Based on how you plan, you pick the specific tools and services that really help you to do those migrations.
Once you really migrate, the next step is to optimize.
The Cloud migration journey did not stop as soon as you get to the Cloud.
I think the journey starts there.
Well, now that you get used to the Cloud, the next step is that, how can I start leveraging the Nato Cloud services? That you can really use those Cloud services to deoptimize your customer experiences, optimize your investments into the Cloud and then essentially you can really invest more so that you can really make your customer experiences much better.
Then the final stage is secure and manage.
Usually, security is not something that you would really think towards the end of the migration journey.
Security and privacy is something that you would think through the entire migration journey.
But what I really mean by secure and manage is, now you can really start leveraging some of the native capabilities that are built into the Cloud that you can really start securing using the Nato Cloud services to start securing your databases, securing your data, securing your access layers and everything that you can really leverage those Cloud Nato services.
Especially Azure has lot of capabilities that you can really effectively manage your resources as well, manage access controls, manage your growth in terms of the Cloud resources you can really use, manage your resources and as well as manager your cost using those management services.
Thats a typical migration journey that the customers really go through.
>> Awesome, thanks, Raj. Thats been really useful.
Its nice to see at high level what the process and the guidance is and that that guidance exists.
Thats great to see.
I would love if you had any examples of big customers that do these big type of migrations and any tips and tricks or how they did it.
>> Im more than happy to share with you.
I definitely want to take the MSIT example itself.
MSIT is a large enterprise that you can think of.
The way that they took their migration journey is that like I mentioned in the previous slide, where you have discovery and assessment phase, where they really scan through the applications, you know youre talking about approximately more than 3,500 applications.
They really put them into different buckets as you see here.
Their five percent of the applications came through remain on premises because of the complexity and legacy nature of those applications.
We did not really find any value migrating those applications by taking that complex migration journey and migrating to the Cloud.
Thats five percent of the applications reminds on-prem.
Then there is another 30 percent of the applications that also we decided that we dont want to pursue the Cloud migrations is because, either we know that they are going to be retiring at some point of time or we know that some of that functionality has been added to the new applications that we recently built.
That really give us an opportunity to eliminate.
First of all, some of the workloads that we dont want to migrate to the Cloud to begin with.
That is really important as well at the same time because you want to prioritize which applications that you want to migrate, which applications you dont want, and which applications that you want to migrate at first.
Then there are 50 percent of the applications that really we decided that some of these applications we want to do a lift and shift migration, migrating to more of a Infrastructure as a Service Platform, and there are some applications that we can really do little more investments by refactoring them and then we can really start leveraging the Cloud Nato way of migrating past services.
Bunch of our applications really fall into that bucket where either we migrated to IaaS or whether we migrate it to Platform as a Service depending on how ready those applications and how much effort that is really involved migrating those.
Then there is a 15 percent of the applications, for example, some of the applications that are not customer-facing but theyre used for internal applications like e-mail services, and as well as the CRM applications that we use to manage our internal assets.
Those are the applications that we started looking at.
Can we use any solutions that are available on the shared ready device? So that is where we really started leveraging Software as a Service.
For example, Dynamic CRM is one thing that we really migrated our customer management applications.
Then we also migrated our e-mail services to Office 365.
That way we really segregated all these different application workloads into multiple buckets.
That really helps us to plan migrations really well.
>> This is really interesting. It also gives a good perspective on how other big organizations are actually thinking about, what theyre actually going to migrate, how theyre going to migrate it, and even evaluating if they should even migrate it and continue to sustain it.
From Microsofts perspective, Raj, how are we thinking about our migrations as an investment? >> We are making heavy investments to really help customer migrations seamless as much as we can.
There are three different areas that we are really investing.
The very fast area is the tools and services that really help you to take the specific migration journey that I talked about in my previous slide.
The tools that really help you to do the discovery of the SQL Server estate of the database estate, and also find out the application dependencies, and then do the readiness assessment and help you to do the actual target fit in terms of what specific TS and skews that my workload can fit to render the similar and exceeded performance, but at the same time also optimizes my cost.
To help you to do all that kind of analysis, we have tools like Azure Migrate that really help you to do the discovery and assessment and then find out the cost estimates migrating to the Cloud.
Then we also have a DMA tool, Data Migration Assistant tool, that really help you to reassess your SQL Server databases.
We have tools like Data Experimentation Assistant tool that you can really do a performance validation even before you migrate how your target is going to respond to you.
Then we also have a tool called SSMA, SQL Server Migration Assistant tool, that especially help you to migrate from the heterogeneous sources like Oracle Sybase DB2, that you can really migrate to Azure SQL.
These are the tools that we really invest and then we keep updating them with the newest capabilities and everything that really help you to automate some of your migration journey there.
Then, we also invest heavily in engineering programs.
We know that some of the migrations are complex.
Its not a tools problem, to begin with, if theyre complex and then you need a lot of guidance in terms of Cloud adoption, how the Cloud is going to look like in terms of your policies and everything, and then take you to the migration journey.
It requires a lot of planning.
We have programs like AMP, Azure Migrate program, and FastTrack where we really provide engineering vital experience for those complex migrations with zero cost for you actually.
We really provide that engineering vital experience to you.
Then we also get a lot of learnings through our tools and as well as working through the programs with the customers.
We got all the learnings and we really document all those migration best practices into the Database Migration Guide and that link is already provided there which is datamigration.Microsoft.com.
You can really use that link to get that step-by-step guidance to take migration journey.
>> Awesome, wow, Raj. It seems like there are a lot of resources available from a tools perspective as well as from getting that hands-on help if its something you needs, and then this data migration guides which is going to give you a custom source and target guides for your migration.
This is been really useful episode Raj.
Any final tips for folks that are just getting into looking at the migration space in their strategy? >> Im sure that you are going to provide some references, resource links into some of this video.
I really suggest that you leverage those links to understand more about our migration journey.
But if you really run into any issues, obviously, please consider that Microsoft is there to help you to take your migration journey.
>> Thanks Raj, thats really useful and this has been a really great episode for me to learn more about the different migration strategies and especially the migration phases, and it was also interesting to see a real-world customer or Microsoft IT, MSIT, how they actually went about doing it and what they actually migrated and when.
Thanks so much, Raj. For our viewers, if you like this video, please like this video and subscribe to our channel.
Leave us a comment and check the links in the description because we have lots of references for you to learn more.
We hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
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Microsoft Developer: Migrating to SQL: Cloud Migration Strategies and Phases in Migration Journey (Ep. 1) | Data Exposed - Cloud Consulting