Migrating Your Applications to Azure: Best Practices and Challenges

Introduction

You’re moving your applications to Azure. Clearly, you’re aware of the multiple benefits Azure offers in the form of a comprehensive set of services and tools for building, deploying, and managing applications on a global network of data centers. You likely also know about its cloud benefits such as speed, flexibility, cost reduction, performance, and reliability, and want to make the best out of it. Right?

In this blog post, we’re helping you with some of the most developer-recommended practices for migrating your applications to Azure. These are based on the four common migration patterns: rehost, refactor, re-architect, and rebuild.

Rehost

Rehosting, you might know, is also known as lift-and-shift migration. It involves moving your existing applications to Azure without making any code changes. It’s the fastest and simplest way to migrate your applications to Azure and gives you the option to move applications quickly to the cloud.

Some of the best practices for rehosting are:

• Use Azure Migrate to assess your on-premises resources and determine their readiness and suitability for Azure. Azure Migrate can also help you estimate the cost and size of your migrated workloads.
• Use Azure Site Recovery to replicate your on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to Azure and perform a failover when you are ready to migrate. Azure Site Recovery can also help you test your migration without affecting your production environment.
• Use Azure Backup to protect your migrated VMs from data loss or corruption. Azure Backup can also help you restore your VMs in case of a disaster.
• Use Azure Monitor to track the performance and health of your migrated VMs. Azure Monitor can also help you identify and troubleshoot issues that may affect your applications.

Refactor

Refactoring is also known as repackage migration. It involves making minor code changes to your existing applications to take advantage of some of the Azure platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities. This can help you reduce the management overhead and improve the scalability and availability of your applications.

Some of the best practices for refactoring are:

• Use Azure App Service to host your web applications and APIs. Azure App Service can provide you with a fully managed web hosting environment that supports multiple languages, frameworks, and integrations.
• Use Azure SQL Database or Azure Database for MySQL/PostgreSQL/MariaDB to host your relational databases. These services can provide you with a fully managed database service that supports high availability, security, and scalability.
• Use Azure Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage to store your files and blobs. These services can provide you with a highly durable, secure, and scalable storage solution that supports various data types and access methods.
• Use Azure Service Bus or Azure Event Grid to enable asynchronous communication between your application components. These services can provide you with a reliable and scalable messaging platform that supports various patterns and protocols.

Rearchitect

Rearchitecting is also known as application modernization. It involves making significant code changes to your existing applications to adopt a cloud-native architecture. This can help you improve the performance, resilience, and agility of your applications.

Some of the best practices for rearchitecting are:

• Use microservices architecture to break down your monolithic applications into smaller, independent, and loosely coupled services. This can help you increase the modularity, scalability, and maintainability of your applications.
• Use containers and Kubernetes to package and orchestrate your microservices. You can use Azure Container Registry to store and manage your container images and use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Azure Container Instances (ACI) to deploy and run your containers.
• Use serverless computing to run your event-driven and stateless functions. You can use Azure Functions or Azure Logic Apps to create and execute your serverless functions without worrying about servers or infrastructure.
• Use DevOps practices and tools to automate and streamline your development, testing, deployment, and monitoring processes. You can use Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions to create and manage your pipelines, workflows, and integrations.

Rebuild

Rebuilding is also known as cloud-native development. It involves creating new applications from scratch using the cloud-native technologies and services. This can help you leverage the full potential of the cloud and deliver innovative solutions.

Some of the best practices for rebuilding are:

• Use Azure Cognitive Services or Azure Machine Learning to add artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to your applications. These services can provide you with pre-built or custom models that can perform various tasks such as vision, speech, language, decision, and anomaly detection.
• Use Azure IoT Hub or Azure Digital Twins to connect and manage your Internet of Things (IoT) devices and solutions. These services can provide you with a secure and scalable platform that supports bi-directional communication, device provisioning, identity management, and data ingestion.
• Use Azure Cosmos DB or Azure Synapse Analytics to handle your big data and analytics needs. These services can provide you with a fully managed database or data warehouse service that supports massive scale, global distribution, low latency, and multiple models.
• Use Azure Blockchain Service or Azure Blockchain Workbench to create and deploy blockchain-based applications. These services can provide you with a fully managed blockchain platform that supports consortium governance, smart contracts, and integration with other services.

Conclusion

Azure, no doubt, is business and developer-friendly. It also has better functionalities and is easier to use than AWS and Google Cloud. If you’d like to ensure a smooth and successful migration that meets your business goals and requirements, practice the steps elucidated in the blog post.

If you need any assistance or guidance with your migration project, feel free to contact us at Cabot Technology Solutions. We understand the challenge of planning and analyzing cloud migration and make sure to do it right for you. You deserve no less than the best of cloud design, implementation, and optimization!