Migration to the cloud is half the battle, with scalability challenges ahead. As we continue to help enterprises migrate their workloads, one common question we answer soon after migration is why scalability is difficult to attain. After all, besides the cost, agility, and flexibility, this is why IT chose to embark on this path in the first place, right?
Like most custom IT projects, scaling the cloud requires the creation and leveraging of tools and processes to optimize for scale. In this blog, we cover some best practices that help get you closer to your goals of scalability.
- Best Practice #1: Establish Strong Policies – The magnitude of changes in cloud infrastructure is high. Unless you establish strong policies, managing all the resources across multiple cloud accounts get out of control quickly. The most effective way to prevent chaos is using tags for resources. Typically, it works very well when the tagging process is embedded into the automation. If there are new resources that don’t comply, automation should terminate these resources. The sooner these policies are enforced, the better off you’ll be in finding underutilized instances and establish processes for downsizing.
- Best Practice #2: Change Management – The objective of the change management process is to ensure all the infrastructure changes cause minimum disruption and meet internal guidelines. While traditional change management is a lot slower than the cloud, automation can be used to streamline processes. Automation will allow your teams to keep track of resource changes in the infrastructure while still working in-line with desired organizational metrics.
- Best Practice #3: Collaboration – Since you’ll be working in a DevOps framework, you’ll need to make sure members of your team can work together and no longer have to wait for IT to provision resources. What doesn’t work well, though, is when no one takes responsibility for optimizing cost and maintaining security. Make sure all teams know their responsibilities and share cost visibility to ensure the best ROI on cloud investment.
In the end, scalability is all about helping the organization stay lean and collaborative while moving towards the future. The purpose of cloud migration is at the center of this, and should provide the optimization leadership seeks. Anything else and you might not be doing what you originally set out to do.
Learn More
Are you looking to make the most of your cloud scaling? Learn how we can help you by speaking to a specialist at sales@perficient.com. Then download our hybrid cloud guide to discover additional cloud best practices.
