“Lift and Shift” vs “Native” apps (pertaining cloud migration).
Brain says “Lift and Shift”, and the brain is not wrong. You already have a working solution, you just need to dockerize the hell out of it and run everything on cloud. However, if “Lift and Shift” involves anything more than lifting the apps, you should rethink. Designing CI/CD pipelines along with the lifting of application might end up taking the same time as designing native apps and using the cloud’s capabilities in an optimal manner.
Experience has taught us that Murphy’s law is at play when the playground is new, so going Native might not be more time consuming than “Lift and Shift”. Also the support from cloud providers nowadays is generally excellent, and you get many integrations our of the box.
There will be instances, however, where the cloud costs are prohibitive. I read a blog recently of a moderately sized company in US thinking of going back to on-prem server racks from AWS, as they believe they are losing money. Another scenarios is where you cannot find native tool to do the work you want to do, or its too expensive. Read my other post about multi-schema-multiple-outputs-stream (m-s-m-o-s) if you are interested. At the cost of having me design a solution for a few months, the client saved millions in investment.
So, in conclusion, there is nothing which says one size fits all. Find your way through the jungle, and have a proper analysis phase in the migration project evaluating what fits you
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