When people first hear about the cloud, they typically envision some nebulous server in the sky. Moving apps to the cloud should be a piece of cake, they think. Simply pick them up, stick them in the cloud, and you’re done.
Reality, of course, is quite different. True, for simple, monolithic applications, you could provision a single cloud instance and simply port the code over.
The problem is, today’s applications are far from simple and rarely monolithic. Even a simple web app has multiple pieces, ranging from front-end web server code interacting with application code on the middle tier, which in turn talks to the database underneath.
However, in the enterprise context, even these multi-tier web apps are more the exception than the rule. Older enterprise applications like ERP run on multiple servers, leveraging various data sources and user interfaces, communicating via some type of middleware.
Migrating such an application to the cloud is a multifaceted, complex task that goes well beyond picking it up and putting it in the cloud. In practice, some components typically remain on premise while others may move to the cloud, creating a hybrid cloud scenario.
Furthermore, quite often developers must rewrite those elements that move to the cloud in order to leverage its advantages. After all, the cloud promises to provide horizontal scalability, elasticity, and automated recovery from failure, among other benefits. It’s essential to architect and build applications appropriately to take advantage of these characteristics.
Read the entire article at http://2ndwatch.com/blog/managing-unexpected-complexity-cloud/.
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