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Data Migration 

No matter the platform, data migration can be messy and time consuming. You need to assure that you have test cases and a plan for doing the final migration while ensuring that the downtime is minimal. You also need a plan to validate that the data has been migrated successfully without error. Microsoft does provide some tools to assist with this, including Azure Database Migration Service and Azure Data factory.

Compatibility

Some applications that require specific on-prem configurations or dependencies may not work out of the box. There’s usually pretty straightforward ways around this, but this is something that needs to be assessed and planned for ahead of time. There is usually a solution involving containerization or virtualization. It’s also a good time to assess whether to continue forwards with individual applications or to shift to a better, potentially more modern solution.

Performance and Cost

Like any platform, you’ll need Azure experts to help optimize the performance of your applications without absurd cost overruns. It’s important to have a consultant that’s familiar with the pricing model of the platform you are migrating to in order to get the most out of it cost effectively.

Fragmented migration

In the case of complex systems, it may not be the best idea to migrate all services at the same time in order to minimize downtime and ensure that potential issues are more compartmentalized. The consequence of that can be a more complex process of ensuring that your services stay up while each piece is migrated.

Disaster Recovery

You’ll need to ensure that your disaster recovery plan and solutions are up to date and ready for your new Azure setup. This is one of the most important steps, and you’ll potentially need to invest in training for your IT teams if you plan to manage this internally.

Azure offers the flexibility of more than 200 cloud-based products and services. Some of these are IaaS products and one are PaaS.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS offers a nice solution between ‘serverless’ solutions and Infrastructure as a Service. PaaS solutions will provide a platform with the OS, networking, storage, and use case specific tools. This allows developers to build applications with more specific requirements and configurations than the ‘just run the code’ that serverless offers without the complexity of configuring everything about the underlying infrastructure.

The billing model is usually based on the time the services are running and not direct execution time as well, and may provide a more cost effective solution. There is also more flexibility in terms of configuration and management compared to serverless, while not needing the infrastructure expertise of a more ground up IaaS solution. Scaling is easier than IaaS, but not as easy as serverless. With some configuration, most platforms offer an easy way to automatically adjust resource usage based on demand.

Infrastructure as a Service

We taught rocks to think, put them in boxes, put hypervisors on them, and rent our pieces of said rocks. Obviously a gross oversimplification, but in the case of IaaS solutions, everything from the OS up is your responsibility to configure. IaaS solutions typically include VPS, storage, networking, or even bare machines with remote management, sometimes called Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS).

IaaS offers you the ultimate level of control, and can even help keep costs lower in the long term by ensuring that you only pay for raw compute instead of any services on top of that. Development complexity can eat that cost, as a developer would typically have no easier time setting up a service on an IaaS platform than they would on a computer in a closet.

Speaking of a computer in a closet, you may wonder what you’re paying for and why you wouldn’t just on-prem something instead of relying on IaaS solutions. The answer is simple- the typical SLA still covers networking, that your machine will work and be accessible, and amortizes the cost of the equipment, management software, and upgrades. In the case of a VPS solution, you have a fault tolerant solution that moves seamlessly between real machines in the datacenter automatically, can typically migrate to other places fairly easily, and has built in tools like snapshot backups, ready to deploy configurations to save time, and are very affordable.

Bare metal IaaS solutions on the other hand are only as fault tolerant as you make them. Say you have a machine failure and lose data- the providers are only going to ensure swift resolution in terms of getting you a replacement machine, not your data. Most don’t even offer any built in solution for backup/snapshots, though may offer ready to go configurations that include that, the responsibility of the proper use still remaining with the customer.