This means ditching outdated, inaccurate architecture diagrams for solutions that can provide accurate representations of your IT environment. Part of understanding your applications’ architecture is getting to know their performance characteristics and resource requirements from CPU, network, memory, and disk utilization to latency, response times, and end-user experience, and even as far as how they contribute to your operational goals. This is especially important for governments due to their unique citizen services, such as 911 emergency response and public safety, and unique latency and data collection needs due to infrastructure like transportation and utilities. Moving forward without this understanding is risky and could lead to costly over-provisioning and potential outages.
Figure 1: This diagram shows the network backbone, the distribution layer, and the access layer. The items above can be added or removed as needed.
Before your agency moves to the cloud, investigate and fix noisy alerts, eliminate false positives, optimize slow database queries, and smooth over erratic response times. Successfully migrating a healthy application to a new environment is a challenging engineering endeavor on its own. Migrating an application that shows signs of wear and tear is a recipe for disaster. And for government networks, often running on older or inefficient platforms, extra attention should be given to ensuring the application is ready for the leap. By giving it a tune up before moving it to the cloud, continuity of services will be more assured, especially in times of unexpected stress. Plus, your IT staff will sleep peacefully at night, freed from the constant worries of a late night call due to the apps failure.
Combine your research with user or customer journey mapping and key transaction discovery to gain a holistic understanding of the value an application and its associated services provide. A deep knowledge of your software value stream proves indispensable when you prioritize which applications to migrate, in what order, and what key user interactions need close monitoring during the migration process. Understanding applications from a user and operational outcome perspective is vital to develop and articulate the business justification for cloud migration.
While cloud vendors provide programmatic access to a rich set of metrics and event streams, which allow you to automatically detect and respond to changes, these metrics are often not in context of the overall application's performance or operational value. Because most traditional monitoring tools have limited or no support for the new class of metrics generated by cloud infrastructure. It's important to choose a performance monitoring solution that not only understands the cloud services being utilized, but also integrates and correlates these metrics with the application and user experience.
Whether intermittent connectivity, sluggish response times, or outright bugs nothing stalls cloud migration efforts more dramatically than a poor user experience. So skip the endless meetings, headaches, and skepticism by monitoring user experience in real-time and simulating user interactions for key journeys. One modern technique to keep tabs on user experience is synthetic monitoring, in which you continuously test your app’s key transactions from multiple locations to ensure your software and services are truly performing at distance and across platforms, devices, and users.
While the benefits of the cloud are obvious to you, those outside of IT, including political and media, require more proof. Be prepared to give it.
Be sure to also demonstrate the benefits from an operational perspective, especially for resident-facing applications. Show how engagement and outcomes improve along with response times for key resident journeys through the application. So make sure you highlight early and often what your agency is gaining from its migration to the cloud.
The performance monitoring solution you choose must be capable of everything you would expect from a traditional monitoring service, but also be capable of tracing distributed transactions through integrated services, monitoring container technologies, and correlating cloud infrastructure changes and events with traditional metrics. Lastly, modern monitoring must easily accommodate server and container instances that last only hours, minutes, or even seconds.
By routing overflow traffic straight to the public cloud automatically, cloud bursting is a reliable method to prevent service interruptions for users. Another major advantage of burstable capacity is providers bill cloud resources on-demand, meaning you only pay for additional resources when you need them. For government agencies, this can help improve productivity when needed, reduce a variety of costs, and increase data storage capabilities. If you don’t take advantage of cloud bursting to augment your data center’s capacity, then you won’t realize the full value to your agency of your cloud investment.
If there isn’t sufficient user demand and operational value in migrating an application, it may not be worth moving at all. You may also discover features that are no longer useful and need a refresh. The primary motivation for governments to move to the cloud is to better serve constituents through increased agility, unlimited scalability, and reduced costs so ensure applications get these benefits.
By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, your agency can leverage different clouds for different applications and workloads. Performing the monitoring and analysis required to select the optimal cloud for each application will make a huge impact on your bottom line and employee/citizen service satisfaction. Enterprise cloud migrations happen over time and in phases. You don’t have to finish where you started, nor do you have to stay with a particular cloud provider as your community of users grows and demands push your applications to the limit.