How Divio Helps with Cloud Migration

Thinking of moving to a cloud infrastructure? In the first part of this series, we discussed a use case scenario for cloud migration, and what you can expect from this sort of project. Let’s now interrogate how Divio can help you with your migration project.

Let’s delve further into cloud migration and how Divio can help customers. We’ll cover what Divio can help with, our shared responsibility model, and what ROI customers can expect.

Quick Recap

We've previously described an app's journey when migrating to the cloud. This process needs to be done for each individual application you want to migrate. If you've got three or four different related applications, the same process needs to be done for all of them. They also need to be orchestrated depending on internal company requirements and specific application requirements. 

It’s important to recognise that the success of the migration depends on a number of factors, but a simpler application makes for a simpler migration. There may be things about connectivity that need to be considered. Specifically the architecture of the applications and how they connect.

They still need to be able to talk to each other, even though they are now in different environments. All of these things need to individually go through the same methodology process. But hopefully from the start they'll have been built in a sound way, so this shouldn’t raise many problems. 

How Divio Helps

At Divio, when we approach the migration journey, it is always the customer’s responsibility to prepare their application for the 12 factor app methodology. We have seen a lot of these journeys, and we can help customers with them. We have a lot of experience in them. We’re happy to assist customers and we can also help, if necessary, with the implementation. We can advise on how things should be done, what are good architectures, and how to properly handle the process.

We help during testing, during the system, testing the load, and undertaking penetration tests. We are there to advise, help and figure out issues.

This includes figuring out problems before the migration. And then when it's time to do the migration, we’re there just in case anything happens or there are questions to be resolved. We also advise and help in the preparation for later on, after the migration. This can be one of the more complicated parts in preparing to move to the cloud. Afterwards, we are there to monitor the application and the systems. 

This is part of our enterprise cloud process for larger companies and those with bigger needs. We are there 100% of the way with you: we guide, we give advice, and we're always available. We're on call to help with anything that happens even before it's on the Divio platform.  

It’s useful to have someone like Divio involved because we can identify issues that companies may not be aware of going into the cloud migration. For example, regarding scaling, this is something that we monitor too. We will advise you if things should be scaled differently.

Additionally, we also do software updates for our base images. (This is a whole topic in itself!) This is basically applying security patches to a base that you can then build your application on top of the base. Basically, it’s all to do with cloud security and we make sure everything is set up correctly from that angle.

We also monitor CPU usage and memory usage. This all depends on the SLAs and the contracts that we have with our client. We are the first line of contact when there's something wrong with the application. When the app is not available, we can go in and debug to see what's wrong.

If there's a CPU issue, we can help to resolve the issue and keep everything running. So from day one, the costs and the effort is shared with us. This is the sort of thing you can expect when you choose to handle a cloud migration with Divio.

Shared Responsibility

Our approach involves shared responsibility. Obviously, there are things that we can take care of and things that the application developer has to take care of. We take care of the ‘cloud chores’. This can include figuring out how things should be, making sure that stuff is the way that it ought to be, acting proactively, and so on.

It’s making sure that all the settings are correct, and that we enforce the latest architecture. We update our infrastructure constantly with the latest security patches underneath, and we update the architecture regularly to be more resilient and more secure underneath. This is something Divio customers don’t need to do, and therefore they don’t have to worry about. 

This level of service is a huge benefit to our customers in terms of what it frees up. In order to do the same thing, companies would need to invest a lot of their time to get to that level. In fact, it's a full-time job, or several full-time jobs, to get the set up correctly.

For us, on the other hand, we can scale every improvement of this kind and share it with all our customers at once. When we make an improvement or an addition, this rolls out to all our customers. For instance, if we make an architectural change, every one of our customers benefits from it.

This means our customers are getting a cutting edge setup without having to invest any of their own time or effort to do that sort of operational work. So they are saving time, money and effort, and they all benefit when we do that work.

We already have this knowledge in house. If one of our customers has a problem with the PaaS or if we can find performance improvements somewhere, we'll improve it. And then all of our customers receive the same improvement. All of our customers are using our platform in many different ways, in many different use cases. But even though they’re using it differently, they all benefit from changes. 

The True Value of Cloud Migration

Moving anything to the 12 factor application methodology and getting that right is a long term investment. The end result is worth it. You need these methodologies to get a good software setup, to get a scalable software set up. It’s important to approach this as an investment that you will see a return on in the long run.

The return here isn’t just financial. It’s having an application that performs as it should, can scale, and basically does everything that you want it to. And looking to the future: more and more tools support these methodologies. The ecosystem around it is growing and growing.

Understanding Divo’s ROI

Divio can save customers up to 60% in cloud costs. If you invest initially, and get on board with the 12 factor methodology, you can save costs by benefiting from the way Divio buys cloud resources. We pass on cloud infrastructure savings to our customers. We don’t charge a margin on cloud infrastructure, unlike a lot of other platforms.

One of the many reasons we have many customers is because we do things right, and once and for all. The cost of doing things, big implementations, let’s say, is then distributed across all our clients. So they all save money in the end. For each improvement, they all save.

The return on investment is what being a Divio customer allows you to do. You’re able to easily scale the cloud, and are able to control how many resources you’re buying. You’ll also be more resilient to failures and outages. It prevents the risk of downtime, and so if, say, you’re relying on your app for commerce, then you keep making money through your app (on account of its uptime) as opposed to losing money while it’s down. 

You will save money in the long run. As time goes on, year on year, what you see is a cumulative savings through efficient use of resources buying in bulk. You’ll be gaining effectively, and if time is money, you’ll be making “money” every time there's an improvement in the ecosystem that Divio created. It’s a solid cloud solution that you can bank on.

Takeaways

Divio is all about creating long lasting value and using proven best practices. When supporting our customers with cloud migration, our approach is to guide and assist our customers. We’re here to share our expertise and help out on a case-by-case basis. Not one migration project is the same, as not one application is the same.

When it comes to ROI, we believe that having a strong foundation saves costs long term. Uptime is inherently valuable. Scalability is inherently valuable. Having an application that does what you want it to do will bring success.