Now that you’ve made the decision to migrate your digital business to the cloud, where do you start? What does success mean? How do you ensure you don’t regress in performance? There is an old adage in carpentry that you should measure a board twice before you make a cut so you don't make a costly mistake. This same principle applies to migrating your workloads to the cloud; if you’re not measuring the state of an application before and after a workload moves, then you are likely to end up wasting precious time and effort.
At that moment of truth when the workload arrives on Amazon Web Services (AWS), seeing an application running in AWS isn’t enough. You need to know the application is stable, customer experience is at least consistent, and infrastructure consumption is acceptable.
Enter the New Relic platform, a simple yet powerful set of tools to baseline, compare, and validate your application ecosystem, both on-premises as well as in AWS. This easy-to-follow guide will show you how to get quantifiable measures of success for your migration, ensure that your migration goes smoothly when things do go wrong, and enable ongoing quality in your applications long after they’ve been successfully migrated to AWS.
Specifically, you’ll learn:
- Acceptance criteria: The concept and requirements.
- The tools: What New Relic is and how to quickly get it set up on your systems.
- Basic baselines and acceptance criteria: How to get immediate “black box” baselines of your systems to answer the most important questions about your migration in minutes.
- Granular baselines and acceptance criteria: How to leverage the full suite of New Relic’s platform to get granular insights about how your applications perform at every tier, and to understand all the requisite dependencies that need to be considered as part of your migration.
- Post-migration optimization: How to continue to benefit from New Relic’s platform after your successful migration, guaranteeing that your environments are never again susceptible to performance degradation without you being aware.
Cloud Migration Acceptance Criteria
Employing a measurement and monitoring strategy to establish baseline metrics during the discovery phase ensures validation of workloads post-migration, success post-migration, and the ability to confidently proceed with production applications. Baseline metrics become particularly important if the project involves handoffs between teams such as system integrators who may not participate in every phase. At the highest level, determining if a migrated workload will be stable and healthy on the new platform before proceeding to full production requires teams to be able to show data that answers the following questions:
- Has an application’s performance gotten faster or slower?
- Is an application more or less stable than before?
- Are we losing customers due to either of the previous questions?
The tolerances for what is acceptable will vary by the business criticality and user expectations of an application. This guide will help you prepare and show you what to measure before and after the moment of truth when the application is running on AWS and everyone is wondering, Can we proceed?