Preparing for Cloud Migration: What Should I Know?

If they're promising savings, ask them straight up for a written guarantee. You’ll likely see them squirm! It's a classic sales tactic, and there's so much scope for unexpected costs in cloud setups that you shouldn’t trust their word alone.

Just throwing this out there, but cloud migrations often only see savings if you go with a full PaaS or SaaS model, rather than IaaS. If any of this is handled poorly, you could see costs skyrocket instead of diminish. A lot of businesses have gone back to on-prem after diving into the cloud, especially when dealing with hybrid setups. It’s important to have a deliberate strategy in place; otherwise, the benefits will be overshadowed by additional costs and performance issues. Take a look at some case studies on cloud repatriation to see what others have experienced.

You're right to be skeptical about the cost savings. If your management has been treated to nice lunches, they're likely to be influenced into thinking the cloud is a win. To combat that, draft a comprehensive cost analysis that compares your current on-prem expenses and potential future costs of running everything on the cloud over the next 5 to 10 years. Include all costs like VMware licenses and extended support for your current servers. It's also worth noting that your applications may experience increased latency if you don't migrate everything in sync. But, if they're adaptable, you might be able to mix and match components between on-prem and cloud. Just ensure the coding is efficient to mitigate any delays.

Have you considered alternatives like migrating from VMware to Proxmox instead of Azure? Sometimes looking at other virtualization options can yield better cost efficiency. There are definitely instances where cloud solutions just aren't the best choice financially.

You really need to be careful with a lift-and-shift approach in Azure. It's often more expensive than keeping things on-prem. One key thing to remember is that Azure bills based on usage. If you’re just moving your current setup without rethinking your operations, you might end up incurring unexpected costs. The way to maximize savings is to shift to services like SQL as a service, which eliminates the need for managing clusters. You might want to run a cost estimate using Azure's calculator based on your existing infrastructure to make your case more tangible. Oh, and I did a similar migration and found that if you separate SQL from app servers, performance really tanked. It's better to migrate both together or leave them on-prem.