Mark BurgessWe made the decision to migrate our hosting environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure a little over a year ago. This blog post is a collection of lessons learnt from our OCI migration, along with insights of what we would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight.
Evaluate All Options for Your OCI Migration Strategy
Our approach to the OCI migration aimed to strike a balance between minimising change and managing risk and delivery time. Given the fixed deadline for the project, any superfluous modifications risked not only derailing the project but also incurring significant financial and compliance costs.
We understood that moving from an on-premise setup to a cloud environment offered a chance to update our system management processes and tools.
Yet the project had to be delivered under a fixed deadline – we were concerned that with introduction of each system change we increased the risk of issues derailing the migration timeline.
To reduce this risk we chose a complete “lift and shift” approach by migrating our on-premise environment “as-is” to OCI. This included not only the core application systems but also all our operational support systems – backup, monitoring, security, scheduling, identity and automation platforms.
Reflecting on Experience: Looking back, it would have been beneficial to evaluate high-level migration options for each systems component to be migrated to cloud.
For instance, we chose to migrate our existing server backup solution to the cloud “as-is” to prevent the introduction of new changes during the migration. In retrospect, adopting a “cloud-native” approach from the start for this component would have lessened the post-migration effort and cost associated to migrate to a cloud-native backup solution.
In hindsight, we would review migration options and cloud solutions for each major system component rather than adopt a blanket migration strategy for all components.
Consider the Output of Migration Utilities
OCI offers a range of pre-configured templates and utilities designed to simplify and accelerate cloud migration activities.
However, these utilities can sometimes result in cloud configurations that are incompatible with the tools and procedures within your existing management frameworks.
Taking extra time initially to review all the touch points of your cloud migration project, including operational support systems and procedures – is crucial. This will provide you with a clear understanding of the fit between your management framework and the target cloud environment. You can then decide if a more tailored target cloud architecture is necessary and develop your migration strategy from there.
Reflecting on Experience: It is worthwhile to assess the target configuration that cloud migration tools provide. Sometimes, creating your own provisioning templates and migrating to a custom-built environment can be more beneficial.
For instance, in our migration of Oracle EBS to OCI, we utilised the Oracle eBusiness Suite Cloud Manager to provision the cloud environment and migrate Oracle eBusiness Suite. Whilst this simplified the migration activities, the resulting configuration changes rendered our existing management frameworks unusable once the Oracle eBusiness Suite environments were migrated to OCI.
We faced the choice of either adapting our management frameworks to fit the environment configured by the Oracle eBusiness Suite Cloud Manager or alternatively, reconfigure our cloud environment to work within our management framework.
Ultimately, we ended up reconfiguring the cloud environment to work within our management framework. This avoided a costly exercise to modify and test our management framework procedures and documentation had we kept the environment configuration produced by the Oracle eBusiness Suite Cloud Manager.
Review Your Standard Operating Procedures
We faced the challenge of migrating a wide variety of standard operating procedures to OCI, encompassing everything from straightforward reporting utilities to intricate environment cloning and refresh tasks. We adopted a “lift-and-shift” strategy for moving our procedures to the cloud.
After the migration, we dedicated significant time and effort to re-engineer these procedures to take full advantage of the capabilities of OCI.
Why did we do this the hard way?
Primarily due to the sunk cost fallacy associated with moving processes to the cloud. Our view was, after years of refining process XYZ on-premise, how could transitioning to the cloud possibly offer improvements?
Adapting our procedures to take full advantage of OCI’s capabilities yielded much higher benefits than had we kept with the status quo. We were able to dramatically simplify and speed up many procedures – far beyond what we could have done on-premise. Going down this path also provided significant cost reductions in cloud service consumption and human effort.
Reflecting on Experience: When migrating to OCI, the bulk of your effort and time will be spent on ensuring the successful migration of your core systems. It can be difficult to project the possibilities of the future state operating environment whilst in the midst of a complex migration.
In hindsight, we would invest time to evaluate our most time consuming and complex processes as part of the planning phase to determine whether there are opportunities to improve them in the OCI environment.
Post-migration, having re-engineered our procedures has provided us with new insights:
- During the OCI migration phase, try to replace maintenance tasks and procedures with cloud services wherever feasible. This will require scoping out candidate procedures during your planning phase. Consider procedures that are bound to on-premise infrastructure tasks as being candidates.
- In most instances, there are cloud services available that can automate or replace legacy processes and activities. The OCI Ansible modules are very comprehensive and provide the basis for end-to-end automation in OCI.
- The cost savings and efficiency gains from integrating cloud services and automation platforms are substantial. This strategy not only enhances the return on investment (ROI) for your OCI cloud migration but also reduces ongoing operational expenses (opex).
Adopt “process” Automation Where Possible
Adopting “process” automation wherever possible can significantly enhance the benefits of being in OCI.
One widely recognised advantage of cloud computing is the speed of provisioning cloud services. However, this is just one part of a larger story. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has all the capabilities available to fundamentally change the cost-efficiency equation. For instance, by combining OCI with tools like Ansible, organisations can drastically reduce the time and effort required to operate and maintain their systems.
Furthermore, OCI promotes standardisation of operational activities. It typically prescribes a single method for most tasks, enabling the creation of operational “templates”. This simplifies your automation procedures and provides the foundation to re-use automation repeatedly in OCI, maximising your initial investment in automation.
Reflecting on Experience: It’s important to understand the options available for automating process flows in cloud environments, especially concerning environment and configuration management along with regular maintenance.
We had not joined the dots between the Ansible capabilities in OCI and how they could be used to our benefit until after we had migrated.
In our case we initially migrated the Oracle eBusiness Suite database tier to OCI compute services – not Oracle Database Base Service. This fit in with our “lift-and-shift” migration strategy to minimise change.
With the benefit of hindsight, had we better understood during the planning phase the cost and time savings available from Ansible automation on OCI, we most likely would have altered our migration strategy to go straight to Oracle Database Base Services. This would have enabled us to realise further cost and efficiency gains at the time of the migration – not 9-12 months after.
Something to keep in mind when formulating your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure migration strategy. The decisions you make during your project planning phase have a direct impact on the benefits realised from your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure migration. Every month that you sit with a cloud environment that is not optimal – is a month lost. You don’t get a refund on your cloud service invoices or credits consumed. It is well worth spending a little more time in the planning phase to envision the target architecture and operating environment and how it will be configured to take advantage of automation.
The Intangible Cost Savings are Huge
While the immediate cost savings from migrating to OCI seemed marginal on paper, especially when considering the expenses of the migration project itself, it wasn’t until after the migration was completed that we began to fully appreciate the intangible benefits. These benefits, which include less management overhead, have been substantial.
We’ve streamlined our operations by standardising our procedures on Ansible playbooks using the OCI module. This has led to significant efficiency gains in maintaining and supporting customer systems.
Additionally, we’ve dramatically simplified the inherent complexity of our environment. This lowers the costs associated to maintain site knowledge between the team and makes support tasks more manageable. Simple tasks that on-premise required knowledge of a particular technology in the context of our on-premise environment – are now replaced with single Ansible tasks using the relevant OCI Ansible module.
Finally, we’ve embraced the flexibility of cloud provisioning and infrastructure management, enhancing our processes with automation. Our use of Ansible playbooks makes it easier to understand the purpose and tasks involved. This approach marks a significant shift from the complex, high-maintenance documentation that previously needed frequent updates to stay relevant.
Reflecting on Experience: Looking back, it’s clear that recognising and accounting for intangible cost savings during the planning phase of the OCI migration can be challenging. We did not understand completely the opportunity OCI presented us to be able to introduce a level of automation into our business than what we would never be able to achieve cost-effectively on-premise.
Armed with this knowledge, in hindsight we would reconsider key decision points around the migration strategy and target cloud architecture that would enable us to realise cost and efficiency savings earlier through earlier adoption of automation on OCI.
Summary
Hopefully our lessons learnt help those contemplating the same journey. Whilst the net benefits of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure migration have been overwhelmingly positive, with the benefit of hindsight there are some things are would have done differently that would have compounded our gains even more.
Looking for help with planning your OCI migration? Get in touch with us today.
