What is Lift-and-Shift in Cloud Migration?
With the operationalization of everything in the cloud, more and more terms associated with cloud migration are everywhere. Many people are using the term ‘lift-and-shift’ nowadays. But what does lift-and-shift mean, and how does impact cloud migration? In this article we will learn about lift and shift migration, its pros and cons and best practices to migrate successfully. Let’s dive in.
Understanding Lift and Shift Migration
The lift and shift migration strategy involves moving apps and data from on-premises to cloud. It essentially involves a straight transfer of the application, which is ‘lifted’ from its existing environment and ‘shifted’ to the cloud. This option is pretty quick and easy so many businesses choose this method for quick migration.
Why Choose Lift-and-shift?
The Organizations choose lift-and-shift migration for many valid reasons. The prime among them include the following.
- Speeds Up Time-to-Deployment: As the application is not changed significantly, lift-and-shift migration is much faster to implement compared to other migration strategies.
- Cost-Effective: Because the application does not undergo significant redesign or development, costs associated with the migration will also be less.
- Disruption-Free: Existing applications continue to run in the cloud with hardly any downtime.
- Announce the capabilities of the cloud using scalability and flexibility without great reconfiguration effort.
Common Scenarios Where Lift-and-Shift is Useful
- Legacy Systems: Most businesses with legacy systems choose lift-and-shift to modernize their infrastructure but don’t want to change the applications.
- Data Center Consolidation: Companies wanting to reduce their data center footprint on-premises may use this to move to the cloud.
- Disaster Recovery: Organizations can leverage lift-and-shift to implement disaster recovery in the cloud and keep data safe with least changes.
Here are some common problems that organizations experience:
- Performance Problems: An application that gets cloud-optimized can see a drop in performance after it is migrated.
- Cost Increase: Organizations may see the cloud costs increase after the application gets migrated due to the unoptimized usage of resources.
- Security Concern: Organizations allow applications to move to the cloud without evaluating the security of it first. This can open these organizations to places where cybercriminals can take advantage of the cloud.
- Limited Cloud Benefit: A lift-and-shift does not allow an organization to benefit from Cloud-native features like auto-scaling, serverless architecture, etc.
Best Practices for Lift-and-Shift Migration
A Lift-and-shift migration is a complicated process involving a lot of steps and decisions. In order to make it a successful process, do consider the following best practices:
- Assessment: Do a proper assessment of your current applications and infrastructure in order to see compatibility with the cloud provider.
- Choosing the Right Cloud Provider: It is important that you choose the right cloud provider which fulfills the necessary needs of your business to ensure a smooth lift-and-shift migration.
- Performance Planning: Try to find out any possible performance issues and plan for optimization once it is migrated.
- Security Implementation: During the process, enhance the security posture for all application and data who are migrating.
- Deploy Monitoring and Optimization: Use proper monitoring tools to ensure optimal performance.
Examples of Successful Lift-and-Shift Migration
Let us look at a few examples:
- Netflix: Netflix initially moved its entire platform to the cloud. They took the lift-and-shift approach for the same. This allowed Netflix to scale at a fast rate as user demand increased.
- Spotify: Similar to Netflix, Spotify moved its services to the cloud using lift-and-shift. This enabled them to listen to millions of concurrent users easily.
- General Electric: GE used a lift-and-shift migration to move its legacy applications to the cloud. This provided them with better operational efficiency.
Conclusion
Lift-and-shift migration provides a low-friction way for organizations to move to the cloud. Some Cost-effective Deployment Options Have Downsides: Performance Issues, Security Issues, And More. Businesses Must Know What The Possible Challenges Are. Most organizations migrate applications or data from on-premises servers to the cloud for cost efficiency and productivity growth. It is essential to know the right method for this process to take place efficiently. Lift and shift migration allows your venture to place applications in a cloud environment. This help takes place without any modifications to the component. This ensures a low downtime that does not affect business operations. All in all, it is an effective way of cloud migration. As technology changes, staying in the know and flexible will help you traverse the complexities of the cloud migration.
