Caylent’s Automation Driven Migration Approach

An automated migration means leveraging pipelines to rebuild or re-platform your systems so that they are deployed into AWS in a more native fashion. So from then on, you’re actually using those same systems going forward to support your infrastructure with everything that you’ve built as part of the migration. 

An automated driven approach to migration is really beneficial for anybody who is more in charge of their own software stack. It’s really problematic to try and create a pipeline to help with a migration of off the shelf programs that you don’t really have any control over. I’ve seen vendor applications that required the vendor to literally log in through a remote desktop and have to apply the correct serial number so that it was registered according to a license, which is incompatible if you’re trying to automate a pipeline. 

If you’re in charge of a whole bunch of programs that you operate the code for, build artifacts, or deploy your own applications, we can create pipelines that not only build off of how you’re already deploying those applications, but also expand on them by building off of your existing workflows and creating ways to deploy them into these new cloud native environments in AWS. And so what that helps you do is it facilitates a DevOps mentality in everything that you’re moving towards. You can kind of get off of your old crusty on-premises servers and start building new cloud native approaches in AWS without having to completely change everything that you’re doing. And you don’t have to worry about the pain that’s associated with these lift and shift migrations where you pick up the whole server and shovel it over because when you do that, you inevitably end up bringing stuff that you really didn’t want to bring over in the first place. 

Automation is a tricky concept though, because automation typically means you have more leadup time. You have to build that automation so you don’t see the results as fast, whereas with the lift and shift you just pick it up and move it and it’s done. With automation driven migrations, you have to build pipelines which looks like more work up front, but the benefit is, those pipelines are then built for you to take advantage of them post-migration. You can still use those same pipelines for your regular application deployment workflows, you can use them to leverage other application deployments, or you can use them to migrate data back and forth. So it becomes sort of this door that opens up and enables you to do more and more cloud native and more and more DevOps related approaches to everything that you’re doing.