Build Artifacts with Andrew

Tag: migration

  • Easier Cloud-to-Cloud Migrations?

    Cloud with a lock. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

    An Empty (Theoretical) Promise

    It’s long been a promise of Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform that you could theoretically create platform-independent IaC and deploy freely into any cloud environment. I doubt anyone ever really meant that literally, but the reality is that your cloud infrastructure is inevitably going to be tied quite closely to your provider. If you’re using an aws_vpc resource, it’s pretty unlikely that you could easily turn that into its equivalent in another provider.

    And yet, several of the organizations I’ve worked with have been reluctant to tie themselves closely with one cloud provider or another. The business reality is that the vendor lock-in is a huge source of anxiety: if AWS suddenly and drastically raised their prices, or if they for some reason became unavailable, lots and lots of businesses would be in a big pickle!

    The amount of work required to manually transfer an existing system from one provider to another would be nearly as much as creating the system in the first place.

    GenAI as the Solution?

    I ran across this article about StackGen’s Cloud Migration product. The article isn’t long, so go read it.

    Instead of requiring DevOps teams to map out resources manually, the system uses read-only API access to scan existing cloud environments. It automatically identifies resources, maps dependencies, and – perhaps most importantly – maintains security policies during the transition.

    StackGen isn’t new to using generative AI for infrastructure problems, but they have an interesting approach here:

    1. Use read-only APIs to identify resources, including those not already in IaC.
    2. Use generative AI to map those resources, including security policies, compliance policies, and resource dependencies.
    3. Convert those mapped resources into deployment-ready IaC for the destination environment.

    Using a process like this to migrate from provider to provider is interesting, but the one use case that really gets me thinking is the ability to deploy into a multi-cloud environment.

    I’ll be keeping my eyes on this one.