...
http://staff.washington.edu/brad/cloud1/
Private
While still in the On-Premise or Private Cloud phase, one of the most important activities you can undertake is to gather an inventory. Document what services are being provided, the applications that are required to run for those services, and then any dependencies that exist. From there, break out each service and assess the critical factors associated with the service. Key elements include:
...
Some applications are particularly well suited to living in the cloud. Application that are public facing, mobile device centric, or iterated upon quite frequently thrive in the public cloud.
Hybrid
During the hybrid cloud phase, on-premise private clouds and off-premise public cloud usage at the IaaS and PaaS layers will be in use at the same time. Although some services may be redundant and provided from multiple clouds, IT infrastructure (data centers, networks, storage, and servers) will be converged, virtual, and software-defined. The speed of creation, final scale, and duration of the hybrid cloud phase will depend on an institution’s individual strategic plan, current infrastructure deployments, desire to avert risks regarding cloud lock-in and unpredictable cost models.
...
Currently owned IT infrastructure will be replaced, refreshed, or phased out over a variety of planned lifecycles and It may be planned that some IT infrastructure will continue to be on-premise for many years. Given this, it is very important to continuously enable the hybrid cloud ecosystem at every opportunity for infrastructure refresh or update. One strategy to consider would be to require all infrastructure upgrades and replacements be evaluated for suitability in the hybrid cloud model. On-premise storage system replacement is a common example By replacing an existing SAN or NAS based storage system with one that provides hosted block storage, this infrastructure will have a higher utilization and effectiveness for its entire lifecycle.
Public
The third phase of service evolution focuses on fully utilizing the public cloud where the majority of an institution’s workload is supported in off-premise environments. The institution is transitioning from purchasing technology infrastructure for anticipated load to a utility model for consuming a technology function. The technology functions are being served by highly scalable, external providers leveraging shared infrastructure to serve multiple clients across numerous industries. Infrastructure is now being uniformly treated as code and is provisioned by developers and testers on demand rather than system administrators. Services are being automatically deployed, managed, and scaled. As an institution migrates to a public-cloud model, it needs to account for its people, process, and technology strategy going forward.
...
Finally, an institution needs to address its technology choices and migration strategy to the public cloud. The previous hybrid model is a natural first step, so most institutions will already have some capacity of workloads running in a public cloud. Like most industries, an organization will start with deploying its new and non-critical workloads, move onto migrating its larger workloads, and finally, migrate its core workloads. This typical migration path generally results in the applications with the most sensitive data and workload being left for last. Before getting to this point, an institution needs to develop a holistic vendor, migration, and security strategy. For example, selecting single or multiple vendors; refactoring, replacing, or rehosting applications; adopting new business processes; determining the exit strategy and cost for vendors; and addressing privacy and security concerns with security reviews, appropriate terms and conditions, and Business Associate Agreements (BAAs). For Infrastructure as a Service, one should consider a design strategy that uses “containers” instead of “servers”. Infrastructure built-on containers is simpler to manage, allows you to manage infrastructure more like an application, and can be more easily moved between clouds (public and private).
Serverless
As we move to our last foreseeable phase of service evolution, we cycle back to a strongly-provisioned client-server model. At this point, endpoints are robust enough to run any required application logic or user interface element. The traditional, three-tier web application (database, application, web) has been dissolved into a data store hosted database, and a highly functional mobile application that interacts with the data store hosted database using a set of structured APIs.
...
Beyond mobile first and backends-as-a-service lays an unknown, but quickly approaching future state. As the pace of IT capabilities quicken, we will continue to see new IT paradigms be developed and arrive to disrupt existing systems. This change is not new, from mainframe to client-server, then to virtualization, and now to cloud, IT has always been up to the challenge.
Artifacts
- Indiana University - Sharing Institutional Data with Third Parties
- CMU Considerations for Implementing Software Solutions
- Harvard IT DevOps Tools
...