us to discover application dependencies and organize appli-
cation information to make the move easier. The informa-
tion from the discovery tools provides the physical charac-
teristics of the servers, and then maps them to the client’s
CMDB. From other sources of cross-referenced data, our
staff builds a picture of the global estate, and determines
where the applications should live — whether on-premises
or in the cloud.
Within the software, we associate important metadata —
such as application entry points, SLAs, PII status, compli-
ance and other risk related information — in a way that
enables the team to decide how best to migrate the selected
applications. The team can then:
• Identity server and application dependencies
• Identify risks
• Determine the migration strategy
• Create a migration plan
• Determine trade-offs and opportunities
• Rightsize resources in the cloud
• Estimate the run rate of your resources in the cloud
Once assembled and analyzed, the migration team uses the
data as their bill of materials for the migration factory. We
will cover this topic in detail in Best Practice #10.
#6 – Build a Minimum
Viable Cloud
There are two key components of the MVC – the Hub and
the Spokes.
SUMMER 2019
The MVC Hub is the portion of your production cloud that
provides all the common IT services consumed by your
cloud customers. We recommend a federated model of
common IT services that are supported centrally by your IT
Operations team. Standard services found in the MVC Hub
are:
• Logging and Monitoring (centralized)
• Identity Access Management (IAM)
• Encryption Tools and Key Management
• Security Services such as IPS/IDS/WAF
• InfoSec (Security Operations Center)
• Image Management and Repositories
• Automation and Templates (e.g., Chef, CloudForma-
tion, etc.)
• Networking Services to On-Premises Resources
• Financial Controls, Chargeback and Billing
The MVC Hub must be created and established first before
you add your first application in the cloud. By establishing
your core centralized services up front, you set the stage for
rapid onboarding of new and existing applications.
Some may ask: Why invest so much up front in the central
services? Good question. We have learned through experi-
ence that the core management
services are a lot easier to imple-
ment prior to moving any appli-
cations. Retrofitting your cloud
foundation is a real pain, and
those who have lived it will tell
you to do the work for your core
services first, then add the
applications.
The Minimum Viable
Cloud (MVC) is one of
the most important of
the 10 best practices.
The Minimum Viable Cloud
(MVC) is one of the most import-
ant of the 10 best practices.
Based on the concept of the Min-
imum Viable Product, the MVC is
the starting point of your first
production cloud, and a platform that you will iterate and
improve as you migrate to the cloud. Azure, AWS and Goo-
gle all allow for automation programming as the primary
means to build the new platform. Therefore, we now must
think about our cloud as a piece of software. Hence, the
new mantra is, “infrastructure as code.”
52 | THE DOPPLER |
The MVC Hub
The MVC Spokes
The MVC Spokes are a set of applications that belong to a
specific owner or business unit. This is the physical cloud
account (such as an AWS customer account) and the sup-
porting VPC(s) necessary to run the application(s). It is also
a logical collection of applications and services that may
belong to a logical business unit. You know and understand