Find out how DuploCloud builds bespoke, solutions for any organization’s migration needs, managing the process from planning through execution
Cloud migrations are one of the most essential steps toward building scalable infrastructure, and DuploCloud takes the guesswork out of the process. But what does that process look like? And how can companies leverage DuploCloud during the migration and beyond to optimize performance while keeping costs low?
DuploCloud Senior Platform Engineer Kelly Ferrone describes some of the common pain points organizations experience when trying to perform a migration themselves and walks through the steps DuploCloud takes to ensure every client’s cloud migration expectations are met.
Cloud Migration Pain Points DuploCloud Can Solve
DuploCloud is poised to help organizations overcome the following obstacles through a customized, hands-on approach to migration.
Compliance Needs
Some compliance standards applications may need to meet, like PCI-DSS for credit card payment processing or HIPAA for protected health information. Compliance can get lost in the shuffle in the rush to move to the cloud.
“One of the reasons a company comes to us to help with a cloud migration is that they already have a cloud environment that they need to make compliant,” Ferrone explains. “Sometimes a SOC 2 or NIST audit shows that there are some gaps, and we can guide these companies into more standardized processes and flows that meet these needs.”
Complexity of On-Premises to Cloud Migration
For many companies, this migration might be their first, and transitioning from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud requires integrating additional tools and solutions.
“On-premises to cloud migrations tend to be a bit more difficult because, much of the time, these customers don’t currently have any cloud setup,” Ferrone says. “They’re not using Docker, they don’t have deployment pipelines, or they’re relying on many manual processes. We can aid them right from the get-go so they can transition from on-premises to the cloud the right way.”
Accumulated Technical Debt
Many solutions—like static variables or hard-coding passwords—may seem like the right choice at the moment, but they can accumulate technical debt that makes a cloud migration more difficult.
“Some of the typical pain points we see during migration are that many companies prioritize speed over quality, and that’s great at the beginning,” Ferrone explains. “Now they want to take the opportunity with the migration to refactor into a fresh, compliant architecture—because who doesn’t like a new pair of shoes? By the end of this process, we’ve helped these teams build a scalable system that is new and compliant.”
Skill Gaps
Product needs inform every aspect of development, from the tools required to do the job down to each employee’s skill set. However, hiring new employees is costly, especially for lean startups looking to maximize the runway they have to bring their products to market. DuploCloud minimizes the skills gap, allowing any organization to reap the benefits of having a DevOps engineer at their beck and call without adding to their overhead.
“Skill gaps are a common reason companies come to us looking for help with their cloud migration,” Ferrone says. “A lot of smaller startups don’t necessarily need a full-time DevOps engineer, but they actually have deep infrastructure and DevOps requirements. Our team brings loads of experience with various specialized skills that are nearly impossible to find in a single employee. Having us around as a resource is endlessly useful because they can just ask us questions, and they have a whole team backing them up to provide answers.”
What a Cloud Migration Looks Like With DuploCloud at Your Side
So what should your cloud migration expectations be? While parts of the process can be standardized, each client’s unique infrastructure requires the process to be customized on a case-by-case basis. DuploCloud works with each client to find the processes and integrations that fit their needs so they can get the most out of their cloud migration from day one, whether they’re migrating to AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or any other platform.
Ferrone offers a step-by-step guide to what that looks like:
- Discovery: “First, we start with discovery so we can understand your app and your system. We’ll get to know what languages you’re using, your frameworks, your tools, providers, vendors, what’s important, and what’s coming and going during the migration.”
- Building the Infrastructure: “When we have a handle on everything, we move to building the infrastructure. This means deploying DuploCloud on our side and walking you through how easy it is to generate a new infrastructure. This usually happens in a development, non-production environment.”
- Building the Data Layer: “Then we deal with the data — an app isn’t an app without its database. So, we start by spinning up EC2 hosts and beginning either a PostgreSQL or MySQL migration. This depends on whether you’re coming from AWS or some other environment and moving to AWS or elsewhere. The data layer migration usually involves tools like Redis or Kafka.”
- Installing Applications: “Once the prerequisite cloud services are there and running within an infrastructure, we can move on to installing the applications themselves. This usually involves a lot of digging into how their configuration maps work. That’s the hardest part — looking into things like the microservices they’re using and finding out what all the variables are.”
- Building Pipelines and/or Infrastructure-as-Code: “After the applications are installed and we have a good baseline of what we’re building in DuploCloud, we can move into setting up pipelines and/or Infrastructure-as-Code (if the client uses it). We’ll use a lot of common, shared DuploCloud-provided code to build pipelines into the provider of their choice, whether that’s GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or CircleCI.”
- Clean Up: “We’ll also help customers tidy up their development flow. This is an opportunity to spruce the place up and move to a more structured deployment framework.”
- Complete Migration: “Once we have everything lined up, we can use their pipelines and IaC to generate production or just move them into production. Then they’re fully migrated.”
- Additional Assistance: “From that point on, they might want to re-architect into another part of DuploCloud, and onboarding might start again when they’ve made a new product.”
Reasons to Choose DuploCloud for Your Cloud Migration
In addition to a highly customized approach that walks you through every step of the migration process, DuploCloud offers numerous other benefits, such as:
Faster Deployment Times
DuploCloud relies on automation to speed up everything, from migration to provisioning infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, accelerating deployment times by a factor of ten.
“Automation is baked into everything we do,” says Ferrone. “The platform itself is an automation tool. If you don’t have DuploCloud, you’d still need other tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to work with your infrastructure. DuploCloud sits in the middle of those tools and automates a lot of the nitpicky details in a very precise way.”
Out-of-the-Box Compliance
DuploCloud’s DevOps Automation Platform is built to the specifications for most compliance certifications, including SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
“Our tool generates infrastructure- and data-level tools out of the box,” Ferrone explains. “The infrastructure itself can be very detailed, with specifics like security groups and IAM roles and how they can talk from app to app. We cover those following the Well-Architected Framework, and what we can generate is out-of-the-box compliance.”
Cost Savings
Instead of hiring expensive DevOps engineers to maintain your infrastructure, you can use that money on other resources that will ultimately provide a better product.
“We work with companies to make their systems less expensive and simpler to maintain,” Ferrone says. “That way, they can focus their hiring efforts on developers to build what actually matters, which is their application.”
Increased Transparency
DuploCloud offers deep insight into critical components of your infrastructure with robust monitoring and logging tools. Plus, you’ll receive automated security and performance alerts to allow you to address issues as they arise.
“The cloud can kind of be like Vegas,” Ferrone says, “where you don’t know what time it is, and you’ve got things floating around and spending money. We add another layer of transparency to your cloud account that allows you to be able to see what’s going on inside of it.”
Expert Customer Service
Whatever you want to accomplish in the cloud, DuploCloud has your back.
“We work directly with our clients,” Ferrone says. “Anytime they add to the system, or they’re doing a migration, they can always come to us and say, ‘Hey, I have this idea. How is that going to affect our performance or cost?’ And we’re always there to give them the cost and performance comparisons that would otherwise require someone to spend their Saturday evening learning AWS.”
Make Migration a Success With DuploCloud.
Ready to transition to the cloud? DuploCloud’s powerful DevOps Automation Platform is here to help. We offer end-to-end cloud migration services, managing your entire journey from planning to execution. We also provide post-migration support with a comprehensive suite of tools to improve security, maximize compliance, and optimize performance.
Request a free 30-minute demo today, and find out how DuploCloud can accelerate your migration while reducing cloud operating costs by up to 75%.
