Data Center Migration

Do you operate a production application and need to migrate it from one data center or cloud instance to another?  

 

You’re not alone.

 

This happens all the time, for many reasons. Maybe you are:

 

Transitioning from a private data center to a public cloud

Moving to a hybrid cloud setup  

Moving to a bigger, better data center

Changing cloud providers  

Recovering from a disaster (DR) and this is an emergency

​

CHALLENGES

Often, the biggest challenges with data center migration are:

 

‘In service’ migration

How to keep your app up, and customers happy, during the migration.  You’ll likely have users actively using the app during the transition, and you can’t just cancel their session in progress and start a new one. So, you must keep all your containers and services available during the transition.

​

Continuous Delivery (CD) across multiple sites

Whether your CD strategy is rolling, canary, or blue/green, you have to learn to do it across sites, because some containers will be in the old site, and others in the new site, at the same time.  Which means that you’ll have to account for all the networking that allows the containers to communicate between two sites.  And, because you're likely using a shared network, like the internet, to connect the two sites, data security becomes a top priority.

​

Traffic Management

Once you start moving containers to the new site, then you have to figure out how to send traffic (requests) to the new site.  Or, more importantly, how to send the right amount of traffic, per container or microservices, to the old site versus the new site. But, where to start? Your containers in one site (cluster) don’t even know how to reach containers in the other cluster, and they certainly don’t know how to balance or control those requests as you transition.

 

SOLUTION 

To solve those challenges, you might consider adding new networking tools (like a Multi-Cloud Network - MCN), new security tools (like a Service Mesh), and maybe even re-writing your container software? But, that may not even be possible for your Ops team to do, as you don’t control site networking and security or software development. Even if you did, this would take multiple teams, an integration effort, and more time than you have.

 

There is good news! 

 

Nethopper allows you to easily distribute and securely connect your existing applications and services across multiple clouds. The Nethopper Multi-Cloud Application Network as a Service provides a revolutionary solution to the ubiquitous problem of multi-cloud application management.  A Multi-Cloud Application Network does all of this in a single tool. Nethopper's solution is built for Application Ops teams, so you don’t need to involve or integrate with other teams and tools to make it work. Even better, Nethopper makes it easy to use a Multi-cloud Application Network, because we offer it ‘as a Service’.

 

Nethopper works with all data centers, cloud networks, and Kubernetes.

 

How does this work:

1. Register for Nethopper (https://mynethopper.com/auth)

2. Create your first multi-cloud network, and add both the old site and the new site

3. Put all your containers in the new site (do this yourself, or use Nethopper to do it) 

4. Create a Multi-Cloud service for each ‘responding’ container

5. Control and monitor your migration from a single dashboard

 

Done! 

 

Now, any application container can reach any other container (service) securely between the two sites, and the traffic will be balanced. The best part: your app developers didn’t have to change a single line of code. One by one, transition all of your containers to the new site, testing along the way, and backing off as necessary. Then, turn off the old site when you are done. Or keep the old site up, and run in protected hybrid or multi-cloud mode for as long as you want. 

 

Your migration is complete.

 

BENEFITS

Simple, No-Code Cloud Data Center Migration 

• No extra software to develop, integrate or support

• Operations team self-service

• Centralized control and monitoring (single pane of glass)

 

Built-In Security

• Secure your data and microservices communication

• Authentication, and mTLS encryption

 

Improve Application Resilience

• In service migration

• Optional: keep both sites up with active-active protection