Must-Dos for a Successful GCP Migration

Cloud migration comes with various benefits such as flexibility, scalability, etc. But it might lead to tricky situations if not executed properly. Lack of proper planning is the primary reason why 83% of the data migrations either exceed the budget or fail.

In this blog let us focus on the must-dos before you migrate your database to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Assessing the Current Environment

The first essential step is to assess the current environment to understand the risk and challenges involved in the migration and to check the compatibility with GCP.

Few important aspects to be considered in the analysis are the hardware, application dependencies, licensing, and performance requirements. Such an assessment greatly helps to understand the migration challenges and provide the following type of conclusions/results.

• Easy to move
• Hard to move 
• Can’t move

Internal Skills & Tools Assessment

To ensure a seamless migration, skills available in the organization should be analyzed, along with the tools required for migration.

For example

GCP recommends Alooma an ETL tool that automates transforming and normalizing the data. 

Dry Run

Initially move one or two applications to Google Cloud environment to understand the flow and validate the performance. This testing phase will help you with:

• Validating performance
• Analyzing design patterns
• Understanding the internal process that needs change
• Understanding the security processes that need to change

Data Migration

It is safe to move the data first, instead of the application, as some of the applications might have dependencies.

During this phase, you will need to decide on the components:

• Google Cloud Storage or NearLine?
• Local SSDs or Persistent Disks?
• Google Cloud SQL, DataStore, or BigTable?

Data can be moved in various ways such as batch data transfers, offline disk imports, database dumps, or streaming to persistent disks.

Move Applications

Move the applications, get them up, and running with the help of lift and shift operations.
The Lift and shift is a strategy for moving an application from one storage location to another without any redesign.

Enhancements

Once the applications are moved to GCP, performance optimization should be taken care of (Elasticity and Monitoring)

• Elasticity: Autoscale up and scale down of applications
• Monitoring: Applications should be monitored regularly to ensure smooth functioning. Stack driver is one such app that is used for monitoring

For more information on how Ameex has helped Fortune 1000 organizations maximize their performance through Cloud deployment, write to us at analytics@ameexusa.com.