Migrating workloads from on-premises systems to a cloud platform or one cloud environment to another, you need to consider many aspects related to current and target platforms. During migration, these platform aspects may vary in services, configurations, technologies, ability, and support. Thus, before transitioning to the cloud environment, IT leaders should balance and orchestrate various factors and aspects of cloud migrations according to the platform alongside establishing an insightful business model. This article will focus on the issues and recommendations while migrating on-premises to the cloud environment. But before proceeding further, at first, business leaders should have their clear reasons for this action, whether to get a centralised data centre, cloud service utilisation, or better performance, all of them or any others. This migration will make leaders aware of the potential configuration complexities and their remediations regardless of the reason. Let’s take a look at the top-15 checklists for moving to the cloud platform:

Hardware Infrastructure Dependencies:

At first, cloud engineers should identify whether there are any hardware dependencies or not, and if yes, then Red Hat OpenShift nodes can be installed there. Hardware dependencies for the cloud may vary from high-performance storage buckets, Graphical processing units, SR-IOV, and TPU to a strengthened deployment of the target platform. There are possibilities where some hardware efficiency and features may not be available on the public cloud and lead to a non-starter situation. Therefore, it is necessary to check hardware and application dependencies before planning cloud migration.

Support COTS Application Operations on the Container Platform:

This cot stands for commercial off-the-shelf applications. Red Hat OCP is leading this particular marketplace when it comes to enterprise container platform space. It contains 44% market share value with 3000+ active users worldwide. Because of that, a large portion of OEMs of COTS applications got the certification for their applications deployed on the OpenShift cloud platform. However, it isn’t necessary for OEMs to verify their application on demand of Cloud Kubernetes, too. Plus, cloud engineers have to choose several OEM solutions wisely to check if it is supportable in the deployment platform or not.

Support Runtime, Middleware, and Integration Technologies:

There are many technology stacks on which containerised applications can rely. This technology stack defines the Kubernetes in which applications may get support on demand. In this case, organisations can choose Kubernetes public cloud platform related offering. If it is not supported in the target platform, then there are chances where they can face complexity to get Kubernetes support.

Ecosystem Tools:

Ecosystem tools are another necessary building block in terms of the PaaS solution. Seeing the popularity of the OCP platform, several ecosystem tools are becoming available for different aspects, like logging, monitoring, security, alerting, and many others. There are chances that the same ecosystem tools might not be available for public cloud platforms’ offerings. Therefore, checking for the platform supportability for ecosystem tools is a must. However, most public cloud platforms prefer and promote their toolsets to draw their customers’ attention to the cloud offerings.

Support for CloudPaks an OEM service:

Many OEM services like IBM’s CloudPaks make their alliance with the OpenShift container ecosystem. If the organisation's service recommendations remain the same, it would be helpful to stick with this containerised platform as the default one. These OEM offerings are not available for the Kubernetes platform, at least for now.

Hybrid Cloud Configuration Support:

This OpenShift containerised platform supports various deployment configurations, including on-prem, public, bare metal, and hybrid cloud platforms. Plus, most public cloud services provide Platform as a Services only. It limits the capabilities to expand cloud platforms and shift workloads from one environment to another.

Technological Variations:

While Kubernetes is the central platform for OpenShift, it acts as one of the various components that design OpenShift products. If the medium contains Kubernetes as a core component, which can only perform production-grade workloads, it might not be an excellent option to choose. Hence, it requires additional configurations, like networking, authentication, monitoring, reporting, etc. Red Hat platform helps organisations bring all these configurations and management. While it also ensures updates and bug fixes across the applications rather than only for Kubernetes. Contrary to Kubernetes, Red Hat handles features and functionalities differently in OpenShift. Red Hat has achieved some updates in its upstream products, such as RHEL, SCC, UBI, etc. Therefore, it is advisable to cognisance the offered aspects during the OpenShift cloud platform migration process.

Planning Migration Methodology:

Most public cloud Kubernetes service providers offer a cloud migration strategy, which demands redesigning containers and performing burdensome testing on the containerised applications. This approach is lengthy and consumes more testing efforts while applying patches in test failure cases. Migrating to OpenShift will require redesigning the testing approaches and eliminating the need for rigorous testing.

Applying Developers’ Perspective:

Red Hat OCP provides a perceptive GUI-based interface for developers and administrators and provides information about running applications and integrations. This checklist is essential and helpful for developers to oversee their products. However, it is not available in public cloud services for now.

Permission Management:

While updates and cohesion of integrations are being maintained, there is no need for tools and integration management. This OpenShift Container Platform brings some abilities. Such as internal container registry, Prometheus-based observation, reporting stack based on EFK, and Jenkins. However, in public cloud-based K8 services, not all mentioned services are used as a product, and developers might have to incorporate and maintain them individually. As time passes, its processes and maintenance become burdensome in larger deployments.

Wrapping Up:

After reading this whole article, we would like to recommend that you should deploy applications. Either on managed OpenShift Container platform or Red Hat OpenShift IaaS public cloud platform. These two platforms are efficient, robust, and provide the cheapest solutions for cloud migration with integrity without even being worried about the tools and applications’ compatibility with the platform. Need experts’ advice in choosing the right cloud computing platform, services suite, and customised solutions? Contact us today!