There are five standard phases to ensure cloud capacity planning before, during, and after cloud migration:
- Pilot and set-up
- Assured migration
- Optimization
- Application Modernization
- Thriving Digital Business
Let’s take a closer look at these different phases.
Phase 1: Pilot and set-up
All successful projects have been developed from solid foundations. This is where you will experiment as you develop new applications in the cloud, try out new services, define the standards and procedures your business will use, and decide the best cloud capacity planning practices for you.
Objectives: Know and master the cloud, instrumentation, and the basic principles of cloud capacity planning. Know what you observe, and understand how and why it is functional.
Expected results:
- A pilot test in the cloud, with data you can measure. This means combining performance data from cloud-based services with host, application, and end-user metrics, events, logs, and traces for full-stack capacity planning.
- A standard approach to instrumentation with a set of replicable practices. Setting standards in place at this stage accelerates later adoption by uncovering issues and bottlenecks earlier.
- Capacity planning best practices that are aligned with your business and goals. For cloud migration to be successful, you need to get a unified view of your pilot and IT environments across the enterprise so you can support the technical migration and your business goals.
Phase 2: Assured Migration
The cloud migration phase always includes three main steps. Before migration, you should assess and establish baselines of infrastructure and application usage and current architecture and complexity to define the approach you want to follow for migration. During the migration, you’ll use instrumentation best practices and find issues and impediments well in advance to set the stage for later. Finally, after the migration, you’ll want to show evidence of your success by comparing the new metrics to the benchmarks obtained before the migration. Or you will validate availability, performance, and pre-established error levels and ideally achieve important KPIs.
Objectives: A fast, efficient, and low-risk migration that is in your control and validated by cloud capacity planning-centric measurements taken before, during, and after the migration.
Expected results:
- Faster cloud migration with pre-migration complexity profiling. Using your current site architecture as a baseline, you can assess your migration, understand its complexity, and set priorities. It also allows you to identify dependencies and speed up the migration.
- Lower risk, lower cost, and faster time to failure detection owing to capacity planning. For a quick and successful migration, detecting and fixing anomalies is crucial. The key to success is being able to observe everything. Root cause analysis, application diagnostics, and full-stack capacity planning will help mitigate risk, reduce costs, and accelerate migration.
- A measurable view of migration performance. As you complete each migration step, you can compare each application’s baseline with that obtained previously. After the migration, you can compare the on-premises baseline, if available, to the one obtained in the cloud after the migration. You can also validate the availability, performance, and error KPIs.
Cloud capacity planning paves the way for a fast, efficient, and low-risk migration that is fully controlled and validated by the measurements taken before, during, and after the migration.
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Phase 3: Optimization
During optimization, you begin to explore the full potential of the cloud. Capacity planning allows you to optimize resource inflow and balance historical usage patterns with real-time customer demands.
Objectives: Become more scalable and optimize cost, speed, and agility to support your KPIs and analytics.
Expected results:
- Right-sized cloud infrastructure and services to optimize your cloud costs. Capacity planning allows you to continually improve cloud provisioning and utilization and correct over- or under-provisioning to balance cost and performance.
- Definition of best practices regarding elasticity and scalability. Assessing elasticity and scalability sheds light on current workloads and usage and identifies areas for improvement and strategies for dealing with traffic spikes.
- Transparent consumption monitoring and forecasting. Capacity planning allows you to plan for various growth scenarios while staying on top of cloud-related costs. It also provides application and business owners complete transparency and will enable them to cost-effectively provision for short- and long-term needs
Phase 4: Application Modernization
It is during the fourth phase that you can take the necessary steps to realize the full potential of the cloud, but only if you are ready. It takes a “modernization mindset”: a true understanding of the benefits of the cloud, with a commitment to transform your applications and your business. For many organizations, this requires a culture shift toward true DevOps collaboration.
Objectives: Make data-driven business decisions and use the power of cloud capacity planning to accelerate deployment cycles and take advantage of emerging opportunities.
Expected results:
- A cultural and operational transformation towards DevOps. With a capacity planning platform, DevOps can help transform the rest of the business by prioritizing technology investments.
- Perfecting the digital user experience. End-to-end capacity planning shows you where latency, errors, and anomalies are in your distributed systems, allowing you to troubleshoot them faster. It also gives the possibility to optimize the online experience of your customers.
- Improved performance, higher quality, and better management of critical applications. Using architectural diagrams in capacity planning data helps you identify your mission-critical applications and their components and make better-informed decisions about refactoring and modernization. This improves the availability, scalability, and reliability of the applications your business depends on.
- An analysis of team performance to guide best practices. Which teams are getting the best performance at the infrastructure or application level and maximizing the cost and efficiency of their cloud investments? Capacity planning will highlight this and display team performance, which will help set standards and best practices and drive business results.
Phase 5: A Thriving Digital Business
Organizations expect a consistently functional, optimized, and high-quality digital experience. But the key to continuous optimization is capacity planning. And that means consolidating information.
Objectives: A thriving, agile, innovative, and profitable cloud business powered by a single factual source, unafraid of making transformational decisions and relentlessly delivering an optimized customer experience.