Cloud Migration with An Automated DataOps and DevOps Platform

By Hubert Yoshida posted 09-27-2019 20:42

Like

Cloud computing has become a critical element in in every company’s strategic plans. Forbes has predictedthat cloud-based spending will reach 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60-70% of all software, services, and technology spending by 2020. However, Forbes notes that a full transition to the cloud has proved more challenging than anticipated and CIOs will rely upon migration assessment and planning activities to identify an optimal allocation of workloads across public and private cloud environments.

Public clouds are not simply existing data centers running virtualized, legacy workloads. They require highly modernized digital application and service environments running on true cloud platforms. Many companies will use hybrid cloud solutions to transition to the cloud at their own pace and at a lower risk and cost. This will be a blend of private and public hyperscale clouds like AWS, Azure, Aliyun (Ali Baba Cloud) and Google Cloud Platform. In addition to Hybrid clouds, customers are employing multi-clouds. According to RightScale’s 2018 State of The Cloud Report, the average organization has 4.8 different clouds. All these clouds, including on prem applications, must bond together through fundamental technology and common management to enable the transfer of the right data and applications, to the right place, at the right time.

DataOps as well as DevOps play an important role in the automation of the processes and tooling to implement a multi-cloud environment. Developing the DataOps and DevOps infrastructure and platform operations for transition to a cloud environment can be a daunting task if IT must develop the expertise and staffing on the fly while doing their day jobs. As a result, many customers look to experienced third parties for transitioning to public cloud. Engagements may be on a short-term tactical basis or as part of a long-term managed service. There is now an ecosystem of managed and professional service providers that has developed to provide Managed Service Providers (MSP) for Public Cloud. Hitachi Vantara’s REAN Cloud is a leader in providing cloud migration services.

REAN Cloud is one of the few MSPs capable of supporting the entire cloud services lifecycle, REAN Cloud's proprietary Cloud Accelerator platform enables companies to automate all stages of cloud adoption — from pre-migration assessment, migration, testing through to compliance documentation and operations — enabling repeatable and consistent results. Through the company's Accelerators, customers can fast track their cloud adoption and effectively respond to business demands while getting the most from their cloud investment.

REAN has a highly differentiated offering from their competitors as it is focused on a platform and the automation of it. REAN places an emphasis on blueprints, packages, and metrics which creates a highly structured, scalable, and repeatable environment. These attributes work extremely well for cloud. This also allows for rapid growth in new areas. This strong foundation enables REAN to build an extensive eco system of certified public cloud partners.

The first step is the migration and deployment to the cloud through rehosting, refactoring, and redevelopment. REAN will advise the best approach to deployment while focusing on the most significant headaches in a multi-cloud world. They can work in extremely diverse legacy environments and migrate applications to the cloud. This is where DataOps can play a significant role in integrating, curating and engineering the data for use in the cloud.

Second, getting an application to the cloud may not be a good idea. It needs to be modernized to actually take advantage of the agility and provisioning capability of the cloud while ensuring that it meets security and availability requirements where control is shared with the cloud provider.

Third, as more applications move to the cloud and monolithic applications are broken down into hundreds of micro services; management, governance, and orchestration become the bigger challenges. REAN has placed significant effort into these hard issues.

REAN focusses on automation and building that into the platform. First is the use of DevOps and low code accelerators. They have built components and microservices that allow developers to create functionality by assembling building blocks instead of writing a bunch of code allowing them to focus on what needs to be done and shrinking the development time by an order of magnitude. Second, they focus on building a factory to automate the building of logic, instead of focusing on the logic per time needed, which creates a highly automated environment that, can be tested, maintained, and updated quickly.

As a proof point, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded REAN a contract for USTRANSCOMM (U.S. Transportation Command) based on REAN’s automation and infrastructure. While still a relatively small company, REAN is in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure MSPs. What may be the most compelling argument is that REAN is one of the top 0.1% of AWS Partners.

Once the transition is completed, REAN Cloud believes in empowering enterprise customers to take over the cloud infrastructure and manage the operations themselves. REAN Clouds offers three options.

Start with REAN services with an initial period to customize the REAN platform to achieve end-to-end automation. In this scenario, REAN team members operate the customer environment.
Customers may choose to purchase the platform and take over the customization and operations with their own team.
Customers may choose to only keep the code exported from the platform (after an initial professional services engagement) and run scripts manually or build their own orchestration of workflows outside of the REAN platform.

For more information on how this is done please see the resources available on our Cloud Migration Services page. In addition to description of use cases like the American Heart Association, Ditech, and Radian Mortgage, you will find informative white papers like The Three Phases of A Successful Cloud migration
#Hu'sPlace
#Blog

0 comments

0 views

Blogs