Lift & Shift VMs
Lift & Shift VMs to Google Cloud
The Cloud has grown to become the main location for storing data for businesses across the globe. In fact, a 2019 survey by TechRepublic on enterprises found that nearly 70% of enterprise organizations were migrating their critical applications to the cloud. The reasons behind this increasing adoption of the Cloud are the many advantages the Cloud offers including high availability, ability to scale rapidly, top security, high reliability & flexibility, backup and recovery, reduced on-premise IT operations, etc. Moreover, in the cloud, companies can leverage some of the Cloud services such as Big Data analytics and Machine Learning to drive business decisions. While the Cloud brings numerous advantages, migrating apps and data from one environment to another can be challenging and requires good planning. Fortunately, Google Cloud provides tools that simplify the process of migrating from your on-premise data center or third-party provider to Google Cloud. There are three major types of migrations: Lift and Shift, Improve and Move, and Rip and Replace. In this article, we will focus on Lift and Shift and the opportunities that Google offers for the same.
What is Lift and Shift?
This is the process of migrating an exact copy of an application (including its data and Operating System environment) from one Tech Infrastructure to another. This process is also known as rehosting. You only apply minimum changes for the application to work in the target environment.
When is Lift and Shift good for?
When a workload or application can run without modification in the target environment, or when there is little or no need to change the application logic.
When you want to migrate off-the-shelf applications that you cannot modify yourself since the application source code is locked.
When you need affordable and more scalable backup and recovery solutions. Migrating backups to the cloud takes the least amount of time because there’s usually no refactoring or it is kept to a minimum.
Lift and Shift migrations tend to be the quickest and easiest because you migrate the existing workloads with minimal refactoring, there is no need for new expertise and your team can use the same set of tools and skills to perform the migration.
Google Cloud solutions for Lift and Shift
Google Cloud VMware Engine – VMware Engine is designed to deliver consistency and innovations that enterprises need. It is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant, scalable infrastructure with fully redundant and dedicated 100Gbps networking. It offers opportunities for simplicity and seamless migration to the cloud to unlock native cloud services such as big data insights.
Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution – this solution provides a solution for you to migrate specialized workloads to Google Cloud. Specialized workloads can be applications that require certified hardware or have heavy licensing constraints, for example, Oracle Database Systems. Such applications may not run on the normal virtual environment of the cloud. With Bare Metal Solutions, you can use your already existing licenses to deploy your specialized workloads on Google Cloud and integrate with GCP services with minimal latency.
Google Cloud Migrate for Compute Engine – is a fast, flexible, and free tool that Google offers to manage workload migration. This tool gets enterprise applications running in Google Cloud with no modification within the shortest time possible, while data continues to migrate transparently in the background.
Google Cloud Database Migration Service – this solution simplifies the migration complexity by offering a single integrated migration experience. The guided experience walks you through the migration process through customized source configuration information, multiple secure networking connectivity options, and easily executable built-in scripts. This migration solution leverages the native replication capabilities of Open Source MySQL and PostgreSQL database management systems for highly accurate, high-fidelity migrations, at no additional cost.
Google Cloud and CloudSimple – Google acquired CloudSimple – a leading provider of secure, high performance, dedicated environments to run VMware workloads in the cloud. This acquisition intends to facilitate easy migration of workloads from on-premise VMware to Google Cloud VMware solution by CloudSimple. More importantly, you can migrate without modifying existing VMware applications hence saving on costs and getting a chance to integrate with GCP services like machine learning APIs and furthermore.