The answer unfortunately, depends. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the optimal approach would depend on your organisation’s unique circumstances. Before embarking on this journey, you should carefully evaluate your internal capabilities, requirements, and desired outcomes. To facilitate the process, below are some questions to guide you:

1.     How critical is it to maintain complete control over your data?

2.     Are you using a simple cloud setup or a complex multi-cloud environment?

3.     What is your budget?

4.     Do you have a team with cloud expertise and bandwidth to manage the migration and ongoing operations?

5.     Is your cloud migration a straightforward resource transfer, or does it involve intricate configurations and ongoing optimisation needs?

6.     How will a partner add value to the process for your organisation? 

Now that we have given these questions some thought, let us look at the benefits and disadvantages of both approaches. 

Steering the ship yourself

Taking the reins and managing your cloud environment internally offers an unparalleled sense of control, potentially reducing upfront cost. You get to dictate every aspect of your cloud setup, ensuring it aligns perfectly with your specific needs and existing security protocols. 

However, venturing solo comes with its own set of challenges.

Successful cloud migration demands a team well-versed in cloud solutions, security best practices, and ongoing optimisation strategies. Building and maintaining this expertise internally can be a significant investment if you do not already have a team to start with. Consider this as well – your existing IT team will bear the additional responsibility of managing the cloud environment, potentially leading to increased workload and delays in core IT operations. Staying updated with the evolving cloud landscape also requires continuous learning and adaptation. Is this something you can afford at this stage?

The power of partnership

On the flipside, partnering with a cloud or managed service provider allows them to bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. These providers possess the expertise to expedite the migration process, leveraging their established tools and methodologies. Their experience allows them to design a cloud environment tailored to your specific needs and workloads, often leading to improved outcomes and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, you also gain access to a team of cloud specialists who can guide you through the complexities of security, compliance, and ongoing management.

The additional factors to consider

Partnering with a cloud or managed service provider is a compelling option but comes with other implications. Firstly, partnering typically involves additional service fees, which can impact the organisation’s overall IT budget. These fees need to be carefully considered and factored into your financial planning to ensure alignment with any budgetary constraints.

Additionally, partnering means entrusting a certain degree of control over your cloud environment to the provider. This shift in control requires open communication and clearly defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs), outlining the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of both parties to ensure transparency and accountability.

A Hybrid Approach

If you desire the best of both worlds, you can also consider a hybrid approach. This approach leverages internal expertise for basic functionalities while engaging a partner for complex aspects or ongoing management. This way, your internal team can gain valuable cloud knowledge while collaborating with the partner. You also get to focus your resources on core functionalities while outsourcing specialised tasks that require deeper expertise.

Partnering with an MSP can be advantageous, but internal capabilities should not be overlooked. Building internal expertise alongside a well-defined partnership with an MSP can provide that win-win future-proof solution for all. 

If you are still uncertain about the best approach, you might want to consider seeking independent advice from cloud specialists. These experts can assess your specific needs and recommend the most suitable strategy, whether it involves internal management, partnering with an MSP, or adopting a hybrid solution. Regardless of the chosen path, you should always ensure open communication and clear expectations with all stakeholders involved.

If you are interested in further discussing your specific circumstances with an expert, please do not hesitate to contact us. 

Recent Developments in the VMware-Broadcom Acquisition

The completion of Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of VMware has introduced significant changes and uncertainties for current VMware clients. The transition to a subscription-based model and other strategic shifts are key developments that could impact existing customers.

Key Issues and Potential Cost Increases:

1. Shift to Subscription-Based Model:
   • Broadcom has announced that VMware will move from perpetual licenses to a subscription-based model. This change means that customers will no longer be able to purchase perpetual licenses and will need to transition to subscriptions or term licenses. This shift could lead to increased costs over time as businesses will be required to renew their subscriptions regularly instead of making a one-time purchase.
2. Simplification of VMware’s Product Portfolio:
   • Broadcom plans to streamline VMware’s product offerings, which includes significant changes to existing services and support structures. While this aims to make the portfolio simpler, it may also result in the discontinuation of certain products and services that customers currently rely on, forcing them to adopt new solutions that could be more costly or less suited to their needs.
3. Increased Costs and Reduced Flexibility:
   • As Broadcom integrates VMware’s operations, customers may face higher costs for support and licensing due to the company’s focus on maximizing returns from its investments. Additionally, the shift to a subscription model reduces the flexibility customers previously had with perpetual licenses, potentially leading to higher total costs of ownership in the long term.

Proxmox: A Viable Alternative

Given these potential issues and impending cost increases, businesses should consider exploring alternatives to VMware. Proxmox stands out as a robust and cost-effective solution for several reasons:

• Open Source and Cost-Effective: Proxmox is built on open-source technologies, eliminating high licensing fees and offering businesses full control over their infrastructure.
• Comprehensive Features: It offers extensive features such as live migration, high availability, and built-in backup and recovery, providing enterprise-grade capabilities without additional costs.
• Community Support and Flexibility: Proxmox benefits from an active community that continually enhances the platform, ensuring robust support and flexibility for various business needs.

To assist businesses in transitioning smoothly from VMware to Proxmox, we have developed an exclusive guide. Sign up now to download the guide and ensure a seamless migration to a more flexible and cost-efficient virtualization solution.

Comparison Table

Summary:

• Cost Efficiency: Proxmox is generally more cost-effective, eliminating high licensing fees.
• Flexibility: Proxmox offers greater flexibility with its open-source model, avoiding vendor lock-in.
• Ease of Use: Proxmox provides a more user-friendly interface, suitable for a range of businesses from SMBs to larger enterprises.
• Support Options: While VMware offers extensive support through paid contracts, Proxmox benefits from a vibrant community and optional paid support.

By considering these factors and exploring Proxmox as an alternative, businesses can avoid the potential pitfalls associated with the recent VMware-Broadcom acquisition and ensure a more stable and cost-effective virtualization strategy.

If you have any questions or need help with the migration, our team of experts is ready to assist you.

“Migrate to the cloud, ditch your hardware, and save money.”

We’ve heard this advice from all sides for the past seven years. Unfortunately, it often becomes clear too late that migrating to the cloud, or even adopting a cloud-native approach, not only fails to deliver the desired savings but can also lead to unpredictable costs and vendor lock-in. Cloud pricing is very complex, and what initially appears to be a clear advantage often turns out to be an unpleasant surprise.

Attempting to exit the cloud can then result in a major dilemma: should you rewrite half of your application and two-thirds of your business processes, or continue paying more and more for cloud services?

Can we avoid problems with cloud migration?

The simplistic advice would be: “Just don’t go to the cloud.” But that’s an oversimplified view. For example, at the beginning of a project, launching in the cloud is a very reasonable and rational choice, and it would be unfortunate to reject it outright. There are also other specific situations and projects for which a cloud-native approach is the best option. Therefore, we recommend that instead of making categorical judgments for or against the cloud, you should keep in mind when entering the cloud that you might want to leave one day.

With this mindset, you won’t get locked into the world of cloud services, and by sticking to proven standard protocols and procedures, you can maintain flexibility. Even if you are already in the cloud, it’s worth looking at your setup and considering how to escape potential lock-in. In today’s article, we will look at several key services that our clients most often deal with when leaving AWS and how to make their transfer as smooth as possible. This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything you might encounter, but from experience, I can say that getting on top of these few services can save a lot of trouble during the transition.

Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

In recent years, Kubernetes (K8s) has become the de facto standard for running containerized applications. Its simplicity, automatic scaling, high availability, and easy cluster expansion with additional nodes are all advantages that K8s offers over traditional infrastructure. Kubernetes was created in 2014 for Google’s internal needs but quickly left its data centres and began to conquer the world. EKS can be run on AWS either on dedicated EC2 instances or using the Fargate tool in serverless mode.

How to migrate EKS from the public cloud?

The great advantage of EKS is its universality. Thanks to 100% compatibility with classic Kubernetes, the transition to your own infrastructure is relatively seamless. You just need to take existing deployments and send them to another cluster.

However, one thing to be a bit cautious about is the ingress settings. AWS uses ingress in the form of its balancers in EKS, so for your own K8s, you need to adjust the ingresses. In most cases, this involves a simple rewrite of the ingress class from AWS to NGINX.

EC2

EC2 virtual servers, along with S3 and RDS, are among the oldest and still very popular services that AWS offers. These servers, running on Linux or Windows and available on the ARM platform, are very similar in nature to traditional servers, making their migration from the cloud easier. Although the configuration of operating systems and applications on EC2 may be comparable to other virtualization platforms or even physical servers, you cannot assume that an EC2 configuration will work elsewhere without adjustments.

How to migrate EC2 from the public cloud?

Migrating EC2 is relatively straightforward due to their similarity to traditional servers. However, it is important to adjust cloud-specific configurations, such as load balancers and network settings, to match the new hosting environment. Special attention should also be paid to operating systems, especially if you use Amazon Linux, which may require modifications to be compatible with more common distributions like RHEL, Debian, or Ubuntu.

S3

The S3 object storage, one of AWS’s first products, now has several open-source alternatives such as MinIO and CEPH, which are fully compatible with AWS S3 and often offer additional features.

How to migrate S3 from the public cloud?

These open-source alternatives can be used for migrating S3. The key is to adjust S3 endpoints in applications to point to the new location. This is usually simple if your applications already use an abstraction layer for working with S3.

In infrastructures we build for clients at vshosting, you most often encounter implementations of MinIO or S3 on the CEPH platform because they provide excellent compatibility and scalability.

RDS

The RDS relational database service supports the most widespread database systems such as MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle.

How to migrate RDS from the public cloud?

When migrating from RDS or its special version Aurora, you may face challenges in data transfer, as AWS does not allow connecting an external database in slave mode for seamless data copying. The only solution is to export data from RDS and import it into your own database solution, which requires application downtime and can be time-consuming if you have a large amount of data.

Elastic Container Service (ECS)

If you want to start using application containerization but don’t want to jump straight into full-fledged K8s, you might opt for ECS. This simple runtime environment for Docker containers, like EKS, uses the power of dedicated EC2 servers or serverless via Fargate. However, the similarity and interoperability end there. ECS is Amazon’s proprietary solution, and there is no 100% alternative for it.

How to migrate ECS from the public cloud?

Since ECS is an exclusive Amazon service, migration requires significant adjustments. On a classic Docker server, you can use existing ECS containers, but the entire deployment method needs to be rewritten from scratch as ECS configurations are not transferable. From experience, we can recommend that if you are considering dockerization, skip the step with ECS and move straight to EKS. The slightly more complicated start will quickly pay off not only in terms of much greater clarity but also in the ability to easily migrate from the cloud to your own K8s.

Lambda

Lambda is a serverless environment for running code. It is one of the first and practically the most used solutions for running applications using batch processing. On the AWS platform, you can run various applications in Lambda written in PHP, NodeJS, or Python.

How to migrate Lambda from the public cloud?

When transitioning to your own solution, consider whether you need to maintain the serverless and event-driven concept or if you can switch to full-fledged containerization. If a serverless approach is necessary, you can use several projects that implement Lambda behaviour in a classic K8s cluster, such as Knative. The downside of this transition is the need to operate the entire K8s cluster on which the functions run. With Knative, you can run functions written in various languages like PHP, NodeJS, Python, or Go, so there is no need to rewrite the application itself.

Final Notes: Gaining Control Over Your Cloud Strategy

As you can see, migrating from the cloud can be straightforward if alternatives to the most commonly used services are considered in advance. However, AWS offers other services that may not be as easily migratable. It is crucial to carefully consider all aspects before deploying new technologies in the cloud. There are certainly applications that are worth running in the cloud long-term (e.g., AI or storage in exabyte scales), but most projects can suffice with solutions that don’t close the door to moving to cheaper and more transparent alternatives.

Businesses have relied on the cloud to drive innovation for nearly two decades, with public cloud being hailed as the transformative force empowering companies to unlock new opportunities via global infrastructures, scalability and software-defined solutions. But with the technology evolving at breakneck speed and as consumption patterns change, evaluating your cloud strategy is essential to future-proof your business as market conditions shift. 

Just like how we check in on our business goals to gauge progress, it is equally important to regularly review our cloud strategy. If you’re embarking on a cloud reassessment journey, here are considerations you should keep in mind:

Configuring for improved performance 

Cloud infrastructure is not static and requires regular finetuning to keep applications running and to prevent outages. Determining where and how the workload runs is crucial in this step. Typically, workloads considered to be more demanding may struggle in the public cloud, while others may need to rely on high-performance networks to work well. Applications that rely on low latency or are unsuitable for distributed computing infrastructures are often best suited for on-prem environments. 

These are general guidance on how best to distribute your workload for enhanced performance. A deeper assessment can help pinpoint other existing performance bottlenecks, such as overutilised resources or inefficient configurations. 

How emerging technologies will influence cloud workload

Technologies, along with business’s needs, are constantly evolving and cloud providers are striving to keep pace. New technologies like serverless computing, edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) bring with them opportunities for business efficiencies and performance improvements. But integrating these into the mix introduces unique sets of requirements, which can have varying demands on cloud workloads. 

Managing spiraling costs 

Cloud computing remains a key part of the IT modernisation strategy. But the cost of cloud services is no longer falling at the rate that it was years ago, where hyperscalers operated on margins below on-prem services. Major cloud service providers including IBM Cloud, Salesforce and ServiceNow for instance, have announced price hikes to reflect this trend. The emergence of new technologies (mentioned above) has also added complexities to cloud pricing, with the costs of running these models often passed onto end users and customers at a premium.

Given the potential of cloud spending to spiral if left unchecked, cost optimisation is fundamental to cloud management. Regular reviews of cloud costs can help identify savings opportunities, and some workloads can stand to benefit from reevaluating infrastructure needs.

Data privacy and compliance

Cost and performance considerations aside, a business may choose to maintain certain workloads on-prem due to stringent data privacy and compliance requirements. End users typically lack visibility into the underlying hardware and the infrastructure hosting these workloads and data. This poses clear challenges for businesses obligated to meet data security and other regulatory requirements, such as clear auditing or data residency proof.

This would be especially prevalent in industries such as healthcare or finance, where handling sensitive customer data is subject to strict regulatory mandates. Therefore, compliance with regulations such as GDPR, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 is essential for protecting sensitive data, and frequent reviews are required to ensure cloud deployments are still compliant overtime.

So, should you move back on-prem? 

In assessing options, businesses may find themselves considering the option of moving back certain workloads or resources on-prem. 

On the upside, operating on-prem gives businesses full infrastructural control and access to all log files, the ability to troubleshoot, correct and audit all activity within the data centre. This level of control lets businesses take proactive steps to protect the environment and address issues promptly, which would be perfect in an ideal world. 

But this decision would still warrant careful consideration given the scale of the reverse migration, and implications across the business. In the same vein, we also understand business’ concerns around the cloud providers’ ability to meet specific uptime and resilience expectations, which can have severe repercussions in the event of, say, an outage.

Meeting in the middle with multi or hybrid cloud strategies

Each operational approach comes with its own advantages and drawbacks. And with that in mind, keeping workloads distributed across multiple cloud providers and environments may still be the best way forward, for now. Organisations have for years embraced a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy, leveraging the strengths of different environments to flexibly run workloads and manage data where it makes the most sense for them. 

At the end of the day, it is not about favouring one environment over the other, but rather rationalising your usage, and continuously refining your consumption. It is about deploying each workload responsibly, with return on investment (ROI) in mind, ensuring that resources are ultimately utilised most effectively. 

If you’d like to speak to an expert about reviewing your cloud strategy, please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our friendly vshosting experts.