Google Cloud Adoption and Migration for the Enterprise, From Strategy to Operation — Overview and Series Index
The Enterprise Challenges
As an architect working across cloud, infrastructure and hosting, I see enterprises facing the same challenges over and over again. Do any of these questions look familiar?
- How do I establish a cloud strategy?
- What are the implications for all my existing incumbent vendors, like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle?
- What about my data centre? Will this enable me to exit my DC(s)? What about colo?
- What do I do with my mainframe workloads? Can I get rid of my mainframe?
- How do I convince my CTO/CIO/CFO and Exec?
- How do I drive value from the cloud?
- Is it cheaper? How can I drive out costs?
- How do I convert this to a viable business case?
- Should it be single cloud or multi-cloud?
- How do we build the skills necessary to operate in cloud effectively?
- How do I establish a Cloud Centre of Excellence?
- Do we need a landing zone? What happens if I skip this?
- How should I segregate the roles and responsibilities between “platform” team and “consumers”? How does this differ from my traditional enterprise operating model?
- Where does SRE fit in?
- How can I enable my consumers / tenants to easily consume our shiny new cloud?
- How do I evaluate my existing estate of applications?
- How do I migrate these applications? Should I?
- Should I lift-and-shift?
- Should I keep VMware?
- What do I do with all my Oracle databases? What about my existing license agreements?
- Are there tools to help me automate my migrations?
- How do I operate cloud efficiently and avoid waste?
- How can I use cloud to leverage my data?
- And how can I leverage AI?
- What are the common pitfalls and mistakes?
If you’re looking for answers to these questions, then you’re in the right place!
And you’re not alone. Whilst many organisations are now quite mature in public cloud, many organisations — particularly larger enterprises with on-premises heritage — are not. And these heritage organisations — whether aligned to Finance, Retail, Automotive, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Logistics, Education, Telecomms or other — share a surprising amount of common technology and vendor choices in their existing IT estate. This means that your organisation’s cloud migration challenges may be less unique than you may have thought. And it means that there are established and proven approaches and solutions you can leverage.
The End-to-End Cloud Adoption Series
Here I will provide you with an end-to-end approach for establishing your cloud strategy, designing and deploying your cloud, upskilling your organisation, migrating your workloads, and operating your cloud efficiently and in a cost effective manner.
The series will:
- Guide you through the overall steps you need to follow.
- Provide checklists for the mandatory and optional considerations for your strategy.
- Provide checklists for the mandatory and optional considerations for your business case.
- Show you how to design, build, manage and govern your cloud.
- Show you how to evaluate, categorise and migrate your existing applications and workloads to the cloud.
- Tell you how to build the skills and capabilities to operate the cloud.
- Show you how to get cost transparency, and optimise the cost of your cloud.
Series Structure
Here are the different publications in this series, in recommended reading order. (I’ll be completing the set over the next few weeks. So follow and subscribe, so you don’t miss the series as it unfolds.)
- A) Goals and overall strategy. B) Reducing software license costs with open source C) Data centre exit, mainframe exit, and BYOD D) Lift-and-shift, GCE and GCVE E) Strategy Checklist
- Creating Your Cloud Adoption Business Case, and Estimating with Google Cloud Migration Centre.
- Cloud Adoption and Cloud Consumption Principles.
- A) Discovery and Mapping Your As-Is to Cloud, and Using Cloud Migration Center. B) Mapping As-Is to Leverage Cloud Value: Infrastructure C) Mapping As-Is to Leverage Cloud Value: OS, Middleware and DBs
- A) Organisational Change, Capabilities, Upskilling, and Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) B) Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Best Practices for SLI / SLO/ SLA
- A) Design your Landing Zone — Design Considerations (Part 1) B) Design your Landing Zone — Design Considerations for Kubernetes and GKE C) Design your Landing Zone — Design Considerations for Monitoring, Logging, Billing and Labelling D) Design your Landing Zone — Design Considerations for IaC and GitOps E) Design your Landing Zone — How To F) Technical Onboarding and LZ Deployment
- Enable Consumers.
- Migration Journey: establish your migration factory; analysis of the as-is existing estate; workload categorisation; map to reusable target blueprints; per-application design; migration execution.
- FinOps and Operational Efficiency.
Before You Go
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