Taking an existing application and migrating it to Azure, or any cloud offering, is a serious undertaking. Enterprise applications can power entire business units, so any change to them should be well documented, communicated, and understood. As stewards of applications whose functionality helps business units make revenue, it is important that every part of the application’s leadership, from the top down, understand what is being proposed when migrating an application to Azure.

There are many steps that need to happen before the migration can even begin. Every organization is different, so details may need to be tweaked.

Organizations are evolving/growing past their current and legacy infrastructures at rapid paces. Often the impetus is to immediately move “to the cloud” and all the problems will be solved. But unless your organization is truly ready to make that move to the cloud, you will encounter several challenges that may impact your move.

The following are some of the top areas to review before moving to the cloud:

State of Data Do you have a defined domain bounded context? Will you host your data in the cloud? If not, are you prepared for hybrid implementation? Do your apps access their data directly, or go through a service/abstraction layer? Are you event based, OLAP/BI, or highly transactional OLTP? Do you have clean data to start with?

State of Application Code

• Are your applications/services stateful or stateless?
• Is your code brittle or highly dependent on other applications?

State of DevOps

• Do you have a CI/CD pipeline in place?
• Can you deploy parts of your code base independently, or does everything have to go at once (including data changes)?

State of Infrastructure

• Do you have a preference for cloud provider?
• Will you be able to support cloud applications internally, or will you explore managed services?

State of Team Maturity

• Do you have team members with cloud technology experience?
• Are the business stakeholders on-board with a move to the cloud?

These questions and their subsequent answers will help you determine your cloud readiness, as well as begin to set the groundwork for a plan to get to the cloud. Once that is in place, prioritization and execution through the plan can help you and your organization make an educated move to the cloud.

This step in the migration should be to define a workgroup of concerned development stakeholders of the application. These should be architects, team leads, senior developers, QA leads, DevOps, PROD support, scrum masters, POs, and management that are currently involved in the day to day development and operations of the application.

The purpose of the workgroup is to define and drive the Migration Plan of the application to Azure, including project scope, stakeholders, budget, constraints, dependencies, and risks. 

The Migration Plan is the series of steps that need to occur for the application to be migrated to Azure. The Development Workgroup’s primary purpose is to define and drive this plan. 

The exact Migration Plan will differ from organization to organization, application to application.

There are, however, some steps of the plan which every large organization will need to include or at least consider in the Development Workgroup meetings. It will first need to be defined, then needs approval from the stakeholders.

With the first draft of the Migration Plan in place, the next step is to gain acceptance from the stakeholders.

Every application has two categories of stakeholders: horizontal and vertical. They are the parts of the organization that will be the most directly affected by every aspect of this migration, thus represent the first layer of approval. A list of groups should be defined within each category along with the purpose of the group and its leadership team.

With all of the stakeholders identified, the Migration Plan should specify a plan for engaging the stakeholders. The goal of the engagement plan is to gain approval from the stakeholders for the Migration Plan to proceed. Each stakeholder will have a different perspective on the migration effort based on their primary area of concern for the application.

Common Stakeholder Engagement Plan

These are the pieces of the engagement plan that will be common among all stakeholders, so the Development Workgroup should have answers immediately ready for them:

1. Why should the application be migrated to Azure?
2. Why is the way the application is currently deployed or developed need to change?
3. What are the benefits, risks?
4. What is the timeline?
5. What is the impact on my group?
6. What will the day to day operations look like during and after the migration?
7. What do you need from my group to make this migration a success?

At a common level, a meeting should be setup with the stakeholder’s leadership to obtain buy-in as well as to solicit advice and guidance. Each group’s acceptance of the migration is critical to the success of the effort as a whole, so every effort should be made to ensure the leadership of the group is confident their concerns have been met by the Migration Plan.