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Lift and shift workloads, and create new apps, for the same cloud

IT managers shouldn’t have to choose between cloud-driven innovation and data-center-style computing. Developers shouldn’t have to choose between the latest DevOps programming using containers and microservices, and traditional architectures and methodologies. CIOs shouldn’t have to choose between a fully automated and fully managed cloud and a self-managed model using their own on-staff administrators.

At an Oracle OpenWorld general session on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) October 3, Don Johnson, senior vice president of product development at Oracle, lamented that CIOs are often forced to make such difficult choices. Sure, the cloud is excellent for purpose-built applications, he said, “and so what’s working for them is cloud-native, but what’s not working in the cloud are enterprise workloads. It’s an unnecessary set of bad choices.”

When it comes to moving existing business-critical applications to the cloud, Johnson explained the three difficult choices faced by many organizations:

  • First, CIOs can rewrite those applications from the ground up to run in the cloud in a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model. That’s best in terms of achieving the greatest computational efficiency, as well as integration with other cloud services, but it can be time-consuming and costly.
  • Second, organizations can retrofit their existing applications to run in in the cloud, but this can be challenging at best, or nearly impossible in some cases.
  • Or third, CIOs can “lift and shift” existing on-premises applications, including their full software stack, directly into the cloud, using the IaaS model.

Historically, those three models have required three different clouds. No longer. Only the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Johnson stated, “lets you run your full existing stack alongside cloud-native applications.” And this is important, he added, because migration to the cloud must be slow and deliberate. “Running in the cloud is very disruptive. It can’t happen overnight. You need to move when and how you want to move,” he said. And a deliberative movement to the cloud means a combination of new cloud-native PaaS applications and legacy applications migrated to IaaS.

Read more in my story for Forbes, “Lift And Shift Workloads — And Write Cloud-Native Apps — For The Same Cloud.”