Tools and Technologies to Facilitate Cloud Migration

Moving to the cloud is essential for businesses wishing to become more agile, scalable and cost effective in their IT operations. Nevertheless, this process can be difficult without the appropriate Cloud Migration tools and technologies guiding it along. In this tutorial we are going to look at some of the most important tools and technologies that you can use to facilitate your journey towards migrating into the cloud.

1. Cloud Assessment Tools

Prior to starting migration into the clouds it is important that you analyze your current IT infrastructure in order to know how ready it is for the migration. Cloud assessment tools aid in evaluating one’s current environment while also identifying potential challenges along with opportunities. Popular cloud assessment tools include:

AWS Migration Hub:

This provides customers with a central place from which they can track the progress of application migrations across AWS services.

You can consult the AWS page for its selection of Cloud Migration Tools.

Azure Migrate:

A comprehensive solution designed for assessing on-premises workloads and planning migrations to Azure.

You can consult the Azure page for his recommandations of Cloud Migration Tools.

Google Cloud’s Migration Assessment Tool:

It helps organizations assess their workloads’ readiness for migration onto Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

You can consult the Google page for its selection of Cloud Migration Tools.

2. Cloud Migration Tools

Having assessed your environment and planned how you are going to move everything, the next thing is to find the right softwares to perform your migration.Cloud migration tools are meant to automate transfer of workloads, applications and data from physical or virtual servers into cloud servers thereby reducing downtime during such processes. These tools include but not limited to;

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS):

Simplifies migration of databases to AWS, supporting homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations.

Azure Site Recovery:

Enables replication, failover, and recovery of on-premises VMware, Hyper-V, and physical servers to Azure.

Google Cloud’s Migrate for Compute Engine:

Migrate your virtual machines from source platforms such as VMware, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon EC2 directly into Compute Engine .

3. DevOps Tools

DevOps is a combination of practices and tools that helps deliver applications and services faster.
DevOps practices are essential in cloud infrastructures. DevOps and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools automate processes of deployment and greatly helps in migrating applications to the cloud. Some of the main DevOps cloud migration tools are listed below :

Docker:

Platform that is used for packaging applications and their dependencies into portable containers.

Kubernetes:

Container orchestration tool for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Terraform:

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you build, change, and version cloud and on-prem resources safely and efficiently.

Jenkins or Azure Devops:

CI/CD automation server for orchestrating the build, test, and deployment pipelines.

4. Cloud Management Platforms

In order for companies to save costs, ensure security & maintain high performance, the efficient management of resources allocated within different cloud environments is required. 

Therefore, it is important to have platforms offering centralized control along with visibility over utilized resources. Cloud Management Platforms come in handy by providing organizations with an opportunity to apply monitoring as well as governance policies across their entire infrastructure while at the same time monitoring such aspects like:

Key cloud management platforms

AWS Management Console:

Web based interface where users can manage various Amazon Web Services like

Azure Portal:

Unified management experience for Azure services, enabling resource provisioning, monitoring, and security management.

Google Cloud Console

It’s the interface for managing Google Cloud resources, deploying applications, and monitoring performance.

5. Monitoring and Analytics Tools

Your Cloud infrastructure and your applications needs to be monitored and analysed in real time in order to detect bottlenecks, performance and scalability issues. Most of the Cloud providers offer real time monitoring tools:

AWS CloudWatch:

An observability and monitoring service for AWS resources including metrics, logs, and events.

Azure Monitor:

Azure service applications and infrastructure comprehensive monitoring and diagnostic.

Google Cloud Monitoring:

Google Cloud resources, applications, and services monitoring, logging, and diagnostics.

Conclusion

The tools described in this article help organizations use, deploy and monitor applications in the Cloud.
We briefly described tools for all steps of the migration project, starting from assessment tools, migration and deployment tools, a quick overview of the devops solutions and finally monitoring and analytics tools.
It’s up to you to choose the tools that best fit your requirements and preferences to maximize efficiency and success in your cloud migration efforts.