Overcoming the Challenges of Cloud Migration

Microservice applications are fast becoming an IT preference because of the increased agility and scalability they offer. And with rising adoption, more and more organizations are migrating these microservice applications to the public cloud. According to the DevPro Journal, the global cloud microservice market is growing at a rate of 22.5 percent, with the U.S. market projected to maintain a growth rate of 27.4 percent.

As a result of such migration initiatives, enterprises are faced with increasingly complex paths between the end user and applications—with many parts of the infrastructure owned and managed by third parties. This creates a loss of visibility into both the application performance throughout the path and the end-user experience.

The Implications of Not Identifying Service Dependencies

IT professionals are well aware of the importance of fully understanding service dependencies associated with an on-premises microservice application operation. Here's a typical scenario: An enterprise IT team discovers that application responsiveness was much faster prior to the cloud migration. After some investigation, the slowdown is attributed to an ancillary service that remained in the data center even after the application had moved to the cloud, highlighting the critical nature of gaining visibility into service dependencies.

The implications of failing to identify service dependencies can manifest in two significant ways—budget and user experience. From a budget perspective, failing to inspect the amount of traffic flowing from the cloud-based application to the ancillary service means businesses may be incurring unnecessarily high transport costs from the public cloud provider. Equally troubling, users are likely to experience slow response times, leading to frustration and inefficient execution of mission-critical tasks and harming business productivity.

Cloud Monitoring Is Key to Successful Microservice Migration

The key to successful microservice application migration is cloud monitoring that provides invaluable insights into service dependencies. This level of visibility reveals the source of problems, enabling IT to troubleshoot and address issues more quickly. By combining appliances on premises, virtual appliances in the public cloud, and business transaction tests (BTTs), IT professionals can close visibility gaps and integrate active and passive smart data for richer analysis.

In the previously mentioned example, a deeper analysis into the unexpected dependency on the ancillary service revealed the volume of traffic between the application and this service. The analytics provided IT with the root cause behind the slowdown in application responsiveness from the end-user perspective.

In today’s enterprise IT environments, it can be very challenging for application owners to gain an accurate understanding of an app’s dependencies. The operating cost implications and potential negative impact to user experience simply cannot be ignored. That is why cloud monitoring is an absolute must. The right technology enables IT teams to visualize service dependencies to ensure app performance satisfies end-user experience requirements and helps to control expenses. In an increasingly complex, interconnected world, having this kind of visibility is imperative when migrating microservices applications to the public cloud.