Essay --

Identifying a Decision Point for Cloud Application Build/MigrationThe decision point is a necessary component to come amidst bloodline and application assessment and vendor selection process. It includes various assessment including Cloud-Decision framework, Service Type and Deployment assessment, and Checklist for returns type. To create these tools, our team analyzed three main components of service delivery. These components consist of cloud concepts, deployment options and service type offerings.Cloud Concepts (IaaS and PaaS)Cloud computing comprises of three classes of services Infrastructure as a Service, platform as a service, and software as a service. While SaaS offers more of ready, tailored solution that suits the business needs, IaaS and PaaS delivers more of a building block type of solutions. On a high level, while IaaS focuses on providing storage and hardware capabilities, PaaS focuses on middleware and the development environment in the cloud. Figure 1 shows more detailed comparison between IaaS and PaaS. The next step that we took was to assess IaaS, PaaS from build-or-buy perspective. According to Gartner Research, three cloud concepts, Cloud Hosted, Cloud Optimized and Cloud Native, are applicable to both IaaS and PaaS. These three cloud concepts look out if the application is more suitable for migration or for Greenfield. Following are the characteristics of each cloud solutionsCloud-hosted solutions require the lowest effort to implement. It transplant, or migrate, the existing enterprise applications on IaaS to gain the benefits of simple shared-hardware multitenancy (Gartner Research). This is feasible for the server that runs rarely used application as redeployi... ...fore migration (Gartner). For the applications which require heavy refactoring, IaaS is much better option than PaaS.The Cloud-optimized solution on PaaS will allow CMI to make continuous refactoring and optimization on its PaaS environment. However, the application may not be an ideal candidate for this option if the answer to every of the following questions below is yes (Gartner)Does the application make direct use of OS or hypervisor resources?Does the application depend on components (such as middleware, services and programming libraries) for which no compatible implementation exists as a cloud services?Is the application primarily focused on batch operations without a Web exploiter interface, or is it a native client application?Does the application make heavy use of custom communication protocols?List of the AssessmentsCloud-Decision Framework