Corporate Journey to the cloud

"EnCircle of wood, born in margins, nine-storey platform, from the tired soil;" A journey begins with a journey. "– Lao Tzu

This year's re:invent conference has made me feel quite amazing. I have the honour to participate in the pre-renewal activities as a client and to demonstrate myself under the care of dozens of business clients and other practitioners. In addition to a wealth of new content, services and customers from a variety of industries and sizes, the AWS partner ecosystem is also evolving. Three years ago, it only took 10 minutes to browse the participants ' presentations, but this year's dazzling content brought me a good memory of 1 hours.

For the core content of this meeting, please refer to Andy's keynote speech.

The cloud has become the new standard.

Implementing cloud technology is a long journey, and we cannot walk through it overnight. In my last blog post, I wrote about some of the challenges and opportunities that companies face in completing this journey. This cloud journey that businesses embark on can and should be presented in a process-based attitude. During this time, you have the opportunity to successfully reduce success, improve execution speed, and develop new skills while bringing more reliable and globally available services to your customers.

Companies that have not yet embarked on this journey are considering how cloud technology can be introduced into their existing environment. This will help them to fully enjoy the benefits of cloud technology as they invest their resources in the areas of concern.

At Dow Jones, we have made an adjustment to the enterprise architecture since the beginning of the 70 and every ten years. In this case, frankly speaking, most of the infrastructure and processes do not deliver the desired results. We are also slow in the pace of new projects, so attempts at failure often lead to costly costs. However, in the development of new projects, we have accumulated a great deal of expertise and experience in collaborating with AWS, and the speed of technical updates has also progressed. We started with a single-new application, then built a VPC to dock the application to a service project behind the firewall, migrate some of the disaster recovery applications, and complete a data center migration in just six weeks with a certain amount of experience. By this time, we are determined to transfer 75% of the overall infrastructure to the cloud in the next three years. We have learned a lot in the implementation process, which makes us realize that the result building in the cloud environment can be so fast, so excellent, its actual effect is much better than the original internal infrastructure solutions. We began to consider the commitment of infrastructure matters to AWS and our own data centers, and to use AWS as the primary means of implementation for each project.

By summarizing our own experience and communicating with our customers, I find that once this cloud journey is on track and the company accumulates some experience, other things will be fruitful in an accelerated manner. The benefits of cloud technology are obvious, and once we know how to take care of the new standard of cloud services, the goal that is almost impossible to achieve will be the priority option in the Cloud migration list. At all stages, you can choose from a variety of options, including whether to redesign Cloud Mei, whether to use AWS Marketplace, whether to accept an open source mechanism, or a combination of technical solutions associated with it. As the experience continues to deepen, the right path will appear in front of us.

That said, the current large-scale availability of AWS service options and their evolving good posture have been compelling, and most large technology companies that are considering introducing cloud computing into their systems are hardly resisting the temptation. You can expect to learn how to integrate AWS into your existing network topology, server and storage models, internal virtualization, desktop management, and management models.

Let's look at the good news together ...

AWS is not a black-and-white proposition. There are already a number of implementation strategies that will guide you to ensure that AWS is compatible with existing investment assets. The entire migration process is implemented at the speed of control and can be adjusted to meet business needs and pressures.

As an initial goal, we are unlikely to be able to move all of our business to the cloud in the first place. And, from a reasonable standpoint, it would be unwise to discontinue all existing activities and move directly to the existing infrastructure, particularly where the existing infrastructure still has its expertise.

Many customers tell us that they find it easy to experience the actual use of AWS without any modifications to the existing infrastructure. After that, customers also have a very convenient way to build a business docking relationship between their existing infrastructure and AWS. Once the connection is set up, we will usher in a new starting point full of possibilities. From here on, everyone's journey to the cloud has been quietly opened.

A typical corporate cloud journey

Over the past few months, I have had the opportunity to communicate with dozens of of business customers from different industries and across the world. By combining this information with my personal experience with the evolution of Dow Jones and News Corp into a cloud-first enterprise, I have summed up the following common cloud technology implementation process:

1. AWS Pilot Project. the pilot object can be a well-defined project or a research and development work that takes a fuzzy success indicator. Common startup use cases in the enterprise include simple sites, mobile application backend, disaster recovery sites, additional capacity in development and test environments, non-mission-critical application migrations, or new implementation standards for future requirements.

2. VPC Integration. at this stage, everyone's task is to establish a connection that ensures that AWS can function as an extension beyond the existing corporate network. Network engineers should take this work in a prudent manner to avoid any negative situations that may cause inconvenience to the business. But beyond that, it's actually a very simple practice that takes only a few hours, not days, or weeks.

3. mixed workloads. most workloads in an enterprise fall into this category. Typically, some of the critical assets in an existing infrastructure take a long time to move smoothly into the cloud. But beyond that, those more flexible systems-depending on the actual asset situation-can immediately become migration alternatives. Focusing on these non-critical systems is the first step to helping enterprise customers get the benefits quickly, and the experience and confidence that they have accumulated over the years will also help the company to successfully complete a shared asset migration in the future. After several system migrations, you will find the whole process easier than expected. I have witnessed the actual execution of many of our clients, and have gained some experience in running hybrid applications, and these companies are beginning to embrace cloud-first guidelines. This approach can also encourage enterprises to look at cloud migration in reverse thinking. Rather than demonstrating whether a project can be implemented in a cloud environment, enterprises should be able to prove why they cannot be implemented in a cloud environment. In this case, organizations tend to take advantage of managed SaaS solutions for a variety of common enterprise back-office functions, such as Hris, e-mail, and collaboration systems.

4. direct connection. the direct connection between the internal data center and AWS is often a prerequisite for network-sensitive applications to function properly in mixed mode. According to my personal experience, we also need to adopt this kind of method in the actual implementation process. Of course, direct connections are not a general prerequisite when trying to mix workloads.

5. AWS Native Ecosystem. as more assets migrate to AWS and enjoy the functional benefits of the platform, companies may be at a tipping point in their overall system, where the ability to leverage the cloud platform is starting to outweigh the functionality that is implemented by the hybrid environment. Some companies have already given their own solution, that is, "comprehensive" implementation of the cloud strategy-infor, Sun Corp and Kempinski hotels are the typical representative.

Is the above situation consistent with the experience of everyone in your own business? You are welcome to share your experience in the comments.

Corporate Journey to the cloud