An Overview of Cloud Migration and Open Source

Most businesses are moving toward making their business processes more user-friendly, through digitization. This shift of business modernization comes with a heavy price for them in terms of money and in terms of time. It is going to take time and a great amount of investment in new innovative technologies.

Cloud computing is the biggest trend in digital transformation due to its ability to make business applications and infrastructure easily accessible. In the roadmap toward cloud migration, businesses are looking to save capital investment or expenses (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX). 

Open source technologies come to rescue for such businesses. Be those who are present at public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, or private data centers. The role and emergence of open source technologies simplified the equation of overall expenditure for all enterprises and organizations of any industry domains. Year by year, more open source projects are coming up and solve major challenges which businesses are facing. Companies such as Red Hat and communities like Linux Foundation have a major role in promoting open source projects at the heart of digital transformation.

Why Open Source at Cloud?

• The main reason to adopt open source technologies in the process of cloud migration can be avoiding vendor lock-in in the future. Most public cloud vendors have a similar portfolio of open source supports in their offerings. As open-source projects are not owned by one company and its overall framework is common to all of its consumers, any updates to its core files have an impact on all projects. And businesses can simply move their application environment from one cloud to another without worrying about backend environment that is powered by open-source projects. There can be a seamless integration of applications and services developed or deployed by different businesses and vendors.
• Open source adoption for cloud will help in interoperability with other enterprise solutions that can be located in different data centers. Though, other data centers should be equipped with the same open source projects. This interoperability enables the reuse of software stacks, libraries and components. Such interoperability can help deploy multi-cloud environment for businesses.

The Cloud-Native Approach in Cloud

Application containerization has been adopted by many solutions providers and vendors in the last few years and has become significantly popular. This containerization surge has triggered the use of cloud-native applications. Most of the popular cloud-native projects are hosted in Linux Foundation’s CNCF (Cloud Native Foundation) community which nurtures the development of various open source projects. Some of the popular projects are Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, Helm, rkt, Linkerd, Etcd, Jaeger, etc.

The cloud-native approach involves the utilization of tools for handling containers, micro-services, service mesh, DevOps and continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). Cloud-native tools for CI/CD can be Check, Ansible, puppet, etc., and service mesh can be Istio, Linkerd, etc.

Most of the enterprises tend to involve open source projects from various umbrella’s to build the Cloud migration strategy. Moving to cloud-native management of application can be a prominent requirement for many enterprises.   

Open Source Cloud Migration Tools

There are open source tools and frameworks that help with cloud data migration. These tools require modification in terms of coding to make the migration process that suits your infrastructure. To make coding customizations in these tools you might need investment for skilled resources.

• Apache NiFi.
• CloverETL.
• Myddleware.
• Talend Open Studio.

The above projects help enterprises to move data. Bluethroat is an open source project which can be used for migration of overall infrastructure from data center to data center, data center to the cloud, cloud to data center and cloud to cloud. Currently it is powered with limited features and used specifically for AWS. It offers the following features:

• Migration of infrastructure to AWS.
• Agentless.
• Environment discovery.
• Automatic network creation and server deployment.
• Linux server migration.

Conclusion

Cloud migration has its own challenges in terms of uptime, security and data loss. Most public clouds are evolved to handle data as well as application workload migrations. There are many benefits to open source projects, as discussed in this article. The main advantages of migrating open source frameworks to the cloud are cutting back on expenses and avoiding bottlenecks.

— Sagar Nangare