KEMP Powers Application Migration to Public Cloud

KEMP POWERS APPLICATION
MIGRATION TO PUBLIC CLOUD
(Corporate HQ) 600 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10020 | KEMPTechnologies.com
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INTRODUCTION
The IT industry has seen its share of technological revolutions, from PCs and the World Wide
Web to the Internet of Things and everything in between.
Today, we are on the brink of another disruptive paradigm shift as an increasing number of
businesses are starting to transition to an on demand digital business model to maintain a
competitive edge. While cultural and operational adjustments are needed to make this
happen, the melding of the appropriate emerging technologies is just as important. A key
supporting technology pillar that enables this transformation is cloud computing. The only
way to be as agile as possible and respond to scale and intelligent data requirements in near
real-time is to leverage an infrastructure built for it. By their very design, public clouds such
as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform satisfy these
requirements in an on demand fashion.
While here are technical motivators for transitioning applications and infrastructure to the
cloud, such as resource elasticity challenges and difficulty to procure and implement new
systems, cloud migration as an enterprise agreed approach is almost always a business
decision. The objective benefits of the organization vary but often center around:
• CAPEX Reduction
Unlike the install-and-own capital model of on premise infrastructure, the cloud
offers pay-as-you-go subscriptions that shift up-front expenses from the customer
to the service provider.
• OPEX Reduction
Economies of scale and efficiency allow cloud providers to offer a variety of
attractive pricing models for organizations running large numbers of applications.

KEMP POWERS APPLICATION MIGRATION TO PUBLIC CLOUD
Additionally, cloud allows resource costs associated with operation and
management of the underlying infrastructure for services to be shifted to the
vendor.
• Business Growth
Planning for increased customers or employees typically means additional strain on
infrastructure. It is almost always more economically sound to leverage cloud to
support this than leasing or building physical data center space.
• Business Continuity
Enterprise approved CIO-led cloud initiatives often start as a way to satisfy business
continuity requirements related to disaster recovery and resilience for critical
applications.
• Agility
Organizations in the cloud can deploy new services in minutes and hours as
opposed to days and weeks as well as scale existing applications on demand the in
order to respond to requirements customer demands more rapidly
Whatever the motivating factor might be, the shift to the public cloud is undeniable.
According to Gartner research, Amazon Web Services and Azure combined yearly revenue has
reached ~$14B. In 2016, RightScale, a SaaS-based cloud computing management provider,
conducted the largest survey to date on the use of the cloud infrastructure. The results
revealed that cloud adoption increased from 63% to 77%, and 95% of organizations surveyed
are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service. According to
Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer, “adoption of the cloud is rising rapidly, with no sign that it’s
going back”. As was the case with virtualization, despite perceived blockers, a catalyst has
already been triggered that can be reverted. A recent Gartner survey backs up Plummer, with
90% of respondents saying they are conducting some form of cloud computing and 78%
saying they plan to increase cloud spending through 2017. An IDC survey also recently noted
that “savvy CIOs now see the cloud as being an extension of their sourcing strategies.”
CLOUD OPTIONS
When evaluating cloud, enterprises have a number of options to choose from in terms of the
model they will leverage for their approach. These are categorized into 3 main branches:
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
SaaS is a delivery model where software is consumed on a subscription basis from a provider
that centrally hosts the infrastructure. A common example of this would be Salesforce. In
order to move legacy applications to this model, data transformation and consulting is
normally required, especially when custom in-house applications are involved. The benefits

here is that the provider in this case is responsible for SLA and all infrastructure and core
code management.
PaaS is a type of cloud computing where a platform is provided by a cloud provider for
development, operation and management of applications without having to manage the
actual underlying infrastructure. An example would be Amazon DynamoDB which provides
extremely low latency NoSQL database services for mobile, web, gaming and IoT workloads.
Another example would be Azure App services which provides a framework for building and
running .NET, NodeJS, PHP, Python and java apps. In both cases, the responsibility for
management, maintenance and configuration of the underlying infrastructure is on the cloud
provider, in these examples, Microsoft or Amazon. The benefits of this approach is agility for
launching new applications and services without the challenges associated with
infrastructure management. By the nature of its design, scaling on demand also becomes
frictionless. Economies of scale also generally make this approach financially attractive for
new application development.
IaaS provides virtualized computing resources accessed over the web. Azure Virtual Machines
and AWS EC2 VMs would both be examples of IaaS. This model still abstracts the customer
from the underlying physical infrastructure but does require management of virtual
resources. The benefits are greater control, reduction in capital investments and fairly simple
approach to expand as you grow. For many organizations today, this is the model used for
transitioning existing applications into the cloud.
While there are a number of cloud providers providing infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) such
as Google, IBM, VMware and others, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
dominate the space. The majority of others have specific value for specific use cases but
presently lack broad applicability. Still, even with Azure and Amazon’s maturity and feature
depth, they still fail to meet the requirements for the easy delivery of all traditional
applications that an organization may be looking to transition. This is a challenge since by
and large, enterprises today are still in lift and shift mode for their workloads to IaaS as
opposed to full re-architecture for PaaS.
ENTERPRISE CHALLENGES
While cloud clearly offers modern enterprises many benefits and the technology has come a
long way, a transition to it is not without its challenges. These range across technology
alignment, application cloud readiness, visibility, lack of in-house expertise and data
sovereignty. And while cloud is almost always more cost-effective at a macro level, when
vendor capabilities are required that are not provided by the chosen cloud provider, the
price of getting into the cloud can significantly grow. Overall, the various challenges can be
placed into three main problem groups

Technology ChallengesTechnology ChallengesTechnology ChallengesTechnology Challenges
The prospect of migrating tens, hundreds or thousands of applications with limited service
interruption is daunting at best. In addition to the application itself, data needs to be
migrated, there may be new plug-ins that require integration for environmental compatibility
and the infrastructure layer in the cloud may not offer the same features and capabilities
that were instrumented on premise. With the application delivery controller (ADC) typically
serving as the publishing point
for applications and providing
critical functions for
availability, ensuring that
these requirements are met in
the cloud platform is a key
consideration as well. At this
point, native ADC capabilities
in the majority of public cloud
environments are not suited
for all traditional, multi-tier
enterprise applications. And
because the operating
concepts for on premise ADCs
are significantly different from
how they operate in the cloud, additional issues can arise after the migration has been
completed.
Financial ChallengesFinancial ChallengesFinancial ChallengesFinancial Challenges
When native cloud capabilities do not meet the needs of the applications being migrated,
costs associated with deployment or migration of 3rd party systems can be high. A way to
address this to re-architect the application to match the capabilities provide by the target
cloud environment. This can be costly in terms of project management with estimates up to
$250,000. Time to market is also likely lengthened for an application migration project when
this becomes necessary.
ApplicationApplicationApplicationApplication----experience Challengesexperience Challengesexperience Challengesexperience Challenges
Customers expect the same quality of experience and reliability from applications they
consume regardless of where the application is located or how it’s connected – they
shouldn’t have to care. However, application performance and response times are less
predictable in the cloud, more complex to design and more challenging to troubleshoot
when issues do arise. For traditional applications migrating to the cloud this can be even
more challenging and may require capabilities not offered natively in the cloud environment
without the introduction of 3rd parties.
Technology
Problem
Financial
Problem
Application
Experience
Problem

CIO CONCERNS
In addition to the enterprise challenges noted, planning a move to the cloud also raises
concerns among CIOs, who realize that migration of existing business-critical packaged
applications is not as easy as flipping a switch. This is often exacerbated by the concerns
over security, vendor lock-in, liability and visibility. As an example, regardless of whether or
not applications end up in cloud through a sanctioned change management process or
because of a rogue business unit, it’s ultimately the CIO’s problem if something goes wrong.
Fortunately, 3rd party vendors and cloud providers themselves have been responsive to
these challenges and developed offerings that help to address these. As an example, a
variety of cloud management platform vendors have developed to help with governance and
policy enforcement across a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure. While data privacy is still
sometimes seen as a blocker to migration, cloud providers have built their business around a
commitment to protecting data and keeping it private. Cost models for running apps in the
cloud also often provide a long term advantage. With connected devices and IoT initiatives
increasing the attack surface for organizations, CIOs are also finding an advantage with cloud
providers who have a depth of security expertise and are often at the forefront of identifying
and mitigating the latest emerging vulnerabilities.
A recent survey by Gartner noted that approximately 70% of CIOs surveyed will be jettisoning
on premise data centers in favor of the cloud over the next two years. The primary reason
given for this shift is that most traditional IT service providers aren’t delivering public cloud-
related services or products that are suited for digital business transformation.
APPLICATION MIGRATION CHALLENGES
For the majority of workloads an application delivery controller(ADC) provides load balancing
functions to ensure high availability and serve as the publishing endpoint for customer
access. Most traditional workloads have very specific requirements when it comes to the
functionality of an ADC ranging from intelligent session persistence, context-based traffic
steering and application-level awareness. Most public clouds offer some type of native
application delivery and load balancing functionality. However, these are not always
sufficient for legacy applications. The reason is that the capabilities native to Azure and AWS
have been designed with cloud native applications in mind which typically have different
requirements. As an example, most cloud native applications are stateless meaning that
session information is replicated within the application and that a client does not have to
maintain a contiguous connection with a single endpoint for a good UX. So, if customer Joe
accesses a cloud-hosted app and connects to Server 1, then gets disconnected, Joe can
access the application again regardless of the server to which he reconnects to without
having a negative user experience. Challenges can arise with packaged applications that were
designed with legacy principles that assumed things like statefulness and application layer
proxying. In this case an interruption in service will require the application to reconnect to
the same server in order to provide users with the same experience they enjoyed prior to the
interruption. An application delivery controller is normally used to meet this requirement.

When application delivery-related capabilities not offered by a cloud provider are needed,
one approach is to simply “bring-your-own-ADC” by leveraging available 3rd party offerings
built for these environments. This ensures that the same capabilities used by the application
on premise is present when the application becomes operational in the cloud provider
environment. However, this presents another set of challenges that are more financial than
technical in nature.
A core driver for moving to the cloud is the flexibility it offers in terms of infrastructure
planning and upfront costs. The traditional application infrastructure planning approach
requires an enterprise architect to predict what maximum usage will be for the applications
in their environment over some period of time, normally ~3 years, and purchase products
and services based on that. This often results in periods of over and under subscription often
referred to as peaks and troughs. When adoption or utilization is not at the planned levels,
the environment has excess capacity which equates to funds that could have been allocated
to impactful business projects. When utilization exceeds what was originally envisaged, user
experience issues ensue and expensive rip and replace of infrastructure must be performed.
Public clouds like Azure and AWS solve this challenge by providing a scale-on-demand
environment with pay-as-you-go utility based licensing. If though, you need to bring existing
technology from your data center into the cloud such as load balancing, you’re presented
with an inconsistency since the consumption models likely don’t match, again requiring you
to predict maximum usage over a pre-specified term in order to control costs. While an
increasing number of vendors do have cloud marketplace offerings, doing the math will
reveal that the 1-3 year TCO is significantly higher than a traditional perpetual license. It is
also likely that the number of individual instances required when moving many applications
to the cloud will be higher given the differences in network architecture and public IP
address allocation. When high availability pairing or clustering is accounted for as well, the
costs can be exponential, creating an impasse for customers looking to complete large scale
application migration projects. For these reasons, a simple vendor model that is consistent
with cloud consumption principles and provides cost control is needed.
ApplicaƟon Virtual Servers “Public” Virtual IPs
ApplicaƟon “Real” Servers “Private” IPs
ApplicaƟon Virtual Servers “Public” Virtual IPs
ApplicaƟon “Real” Servers “Private” IPs
10,
50,
100
vADCs?LiŌ-&-ShiŌ

KEMP 360 CLOUD™
KEMP Technologies is a leading provider of application delivery solutions for enterprises, is in
the top 3 most deployed ADCs in the industry, top 10 most deployed ISV solution in the Azure
Marketplace and was the only vendor in the Visionary category of the 2015 Gartner Magic
Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers.
Supporting customers who are on a cloud journey is a key objective of the company and
reflected in their being the first ADC commercially available for Microsoft Azure, continued
cloud focused product integration and ongoing collaboration with a global network of cloud
system integrators to deliver joint customer value.
KEMP 360 Cloud™ is KEMP’s product and services suite subscription focused on supporting
the migration of applications to a cloud operating model. It combines flexible billing models
and a simplified bundling of essential application focused services to help make migration
projects as simple as possible.
KEMP’s software focus enables delivery of the same high performance and functionality
across all cloud and virtualized environments without a dependency on specialized
hardware. Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are easily implemented using integrated VPN
and global load balancing (GSLB) for resiliency. KEMP 360 Cloud enables customers to deploy
KEMP’s application delivery and management technology without concerns over predicting
the total capacity required in terms of instance count. This provides greater flexibility and
allows for application delivery elements to be consumed in an on-demand cloud-centric
model. Where a mix of cloud and on premises platforms is in use, KEMP 360 Cloud integrates
with each to offer a consolidated view of resource consumption and performance as well as
a single point to perform operational tasks such as software upgrades and configuration
KEMP 360
Cloud
VLM
Virtual ADC
MELA
Licensing
KEMP 360
Vision
KEMP 360
Central
Migration &
Professional
Services

backups. Migration of application delivery services between platforms is greatly simplified
through a simple drag-and-drop console while configurations and policies are consistently
applied across all resources regardless of location enabling greater control.
Insight on current and historical usage is the basis for accurate migration planning. In order
to architect a cloud infrastructure for existing applications, it’s important to have a clear
understanding of the requirements for those applications. With KEMP 360 Cloud, existing on
premises usage can be collated from both KEMP and 3rd party application delivery instances
to allow for correct resource allocation in the cloud. Once a cloud migration is completed,
the collation of performance metrics continues and provide the analytics for optimal ongoing
performance.
KEMP also offer a unique service where the application delivery infrastructure is integrated
with the KEMP customer support to combine early detection and notification of issues along
with incident response and management automation. With early detection, the KEMP team
can use their expertise and institutional knowledge to diagnose the issue and reach out to
the customer with suggested actions to mitigate and remediate the issue. Operational costs
are significantly lowered as 24/7 coverage and access to the subject matter experts reduces
the need to expand in-house expertise and headcount.
A KEMP 360 Cloud subscription affords a customer the benefit of getting the technologies
support needed support a seamless migration of existing application delivery capabilities to
the public cloud. This is all provided via flexible licensing and consumption that prevents
customers from needing to go through tedious à la carte SKU procurement.
As has been highlighted, resource deployment and consumption in the cloud is dynamic in
nature and the pricing models that are focused on ADC capacity and number of instances do
not meet the demands of application delivery in the cloud. With KEMP’s Metered Enterprise
Licensing (MELA), KEMP 360 Cloud recasts the licensing model to deliver unlimited instances
of uncapped capacity across all delivery platforms within an organization. For billing
purposes, usage across instances and platforms is aggregated on a monthly basis with built
in overage terms to
accommodate unexpected
usage spikes. Since a
metered licensing
approach is leveraged,
there also is flexibility in
terms of responding to
usages growth and
shrinkage without negative
financial implications.

WHY KEMP? WHY NOW
At KEMP, we are cloud application delivery specialists – it’s our core business and the only
thing we do. Unlike “born in cloud” providers, we have the experience of 40,000 actually
deployments across hundreds of applications. Unlike “industry gorillas”, our goal is to help
you deploy your apps where it best suits your business, not where it’s most financially
beneficial for us and our stakeholders. Additionally, we are the only provider that has a
vision to deliver the Application Experience Management that your enterprise needs.
In today’s highly competitive global marketplace, companies must make progress towards
transitioning to a digital on-demand business model if they want to be the disruptors as
opposed to the disrupted. From a technology perspective, public cloud will continue to play a
growing part in making this possible. Organizations now need to align with technology
partners that have a clear cloud strategy or replace them with those that have an approach
that will better enable them for success.
The question enterprises need to ask today no longer is if they should adopt a cloud strategy
and seek to transition application services but how they will do it and who they will choose
as technology advisors to help them on the path to greater agility, increased scale and
increased capabilities to deliver intelligent and responsive on demand services for their
customers.

AUTHORS
Peter Melerud – CMO, KEMP Technologies
Jason Dover – Director, Product Line Management, KEMP Technologies
REFERENCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
https://support.rackspace.com/white-paper/moving-your-infrastructure-to-the-cloud-how-to-
maximize-benefits-and-avoid-pitfalls/
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2685515
http://www.gizmoxts.com/transposition/the-need/item/28-the-cost-of-rewriting-applications
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KEMP Powers Application Migration to Public Cloud

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