Making sure everything is running smoothly after a cloud migration is critically important, even after a lot of time has passed. It’s also important to continue the optimization journey post-migration. Pat Wright explains why in this article, part of his ‘How to migrate from on-prem to the cloud‘ series.

You’ll likely have one or two processes that didn’t properly migrate and now don’t work – you’ll want to find these before they impact your customers. You’ll also want to optimize your resources now that you’re in this shiny new cloud, after all those hours of work.

It’s also important to understand that migrations like to scale everything up and use more resources to deal with the complexity of the migration. You may have started this process to save costs in the future – so now you need to focus on how your system is actually running, and optimize for it. But how’s best to do so? Here’s my advice.

Ensure the key baselines are on the system

Knowing what resources (cpu, mem, disk) the system has been using will give you an idea of what you should expect from you new cloud servers. You can use these baselines to compare what the cloud is doing to make adjustments. 

Minimize, minimize, minimize…

Now that you’re in the cloud, it’s crucial to understand that everything has a cost. The more you can review what is actually needed (or not), the more you can trim down and cut those costs. So, focus on what you can now shrink, even if this just asks of each cluster, “do we need these resources?”

…and set up automation to help do so

On a similar note, it’s good practice to set up an automation to focus on removing servers/resources you no longer need. It’s now VERY easy to create a server and test things. It’s also very easy to forget you have the server and not shut it down! Automation can greatly help with this, so you should put something in place sooner rather than later.

Learn what metrics you now need to track 

Cloud servers have some metrics that don’t act the same as on-premises servers, so it’s important you understand these. Working directly with your cloud provider should help here.

Check your permissions, security, and roles

Security may have taken a back seat during the migration phase, so it’s imperative to now review that and get everything in order.

A cloud migration is never just ‘done’

Even after completing all the steps above, you’re never truly ‘finished’ with a cloud migration. At least, I’ve never seen this myself. Typically, you get over a few big components/applications and then spend even more time optimizing and improving. I do see that migrations change everything about a company and how it works. It does make things better in the end. Of course, you want to now take advantage of that, and focus on what you can do to continue to optimize for the future.

But first – celebrate!

It’s important to let people know all the good work they’ve put into the project. Cloud migrations can take a long time, so I suggest setting milestones along the way to ‘celebrate’ when you hit them.

The importance of knowledge sharing

The cloud migration may not be over because, as mentioned, it rarely ever is. However, the team that executed the migration may now have other projects to work on, so others need to be trained up. Just like I’m sharing knowledge in these articles, it’s important to do the same with your colleagues. To make things easier, you’ll ideally have documented everything during the migration, as noted in a previous article.

Focus on automation to ensure future migration success

This is loosely connected to what I mentioned earlier, but this time I’m more referring to automation that can help with future cloud migrations. You may have written some good scripts during the migration, and made some useful tools, so now’s a great time to harden them and adapt them for a variety of situations.

Check any fixes you may have made during the cloud migration

Perhaps, during the cloud migration, you needed to put in place some temporary fixes to the application. Well, don’t lose those changes! Make sure to go back and address them.

In summary: the migration is never fully ‘over’

This most likely won’t be the end of the project. For example, you may have other applications that you weren’t able to move alongside everything else, so now need to be taken care of. In a large organization, a cloud migration can sometimes even take several years! For now, though, make sure to celebrate – migrations are one of the largest projects you can take on.