Migration to Google Cloud: Choosing your migration path

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This document presents the Migration to Google Cloud series and helps you to understand how each piece of the series relates to other documents. This document is an overview for the following series:

These series are for anyone who is intending to migrate virtual machines (VMs), containers, databases, or storage to Google Cloud. This document is useful for the following migration scenarios:

  • From an on-premises environment
  • From a private hosting environment
  • From another cloud provider to Google Cloud

As part of your migration journey, you have to make decisions that are dependent on the environment, the workloads, and the infrastructure that you're migrating to Google Cloud or to a hybrid cloud environment. These documents help you choose the best path to suit your migration needs in the following ways:

  1. Establish a framework to design and run your migration journey by using the Migration to Google Cloud series.
  2. Use this framework as a baseline against which you can assess your migration progress.
  3. Give guidance that's specific to a particular environment or use case by building on the Migration to Google Cloud framework, such as Migrating VMs with Migrate to VMs, Migrating containers to Google Cloud, and Migrating VMs to containers with Migrate to Containers.

Benefits of establishing a migration framework

Establishing a migration framework is important because migration can be a repeatable task. For example, if you initially migrate your VMs to Google Cloud, you might also consider moving other data and workloads to Google Cloud. Establishing a general framework that can be applied to different workloads can make future migrations easier for you.

The following diagram illustrates the migration phases:

Migration path with four phases.

During each migration step, you follow the phases defined in Migration to Google Cloud: Getting started:

  1. Assessing and discovering your workloads.
  2. Planning and building a foundation.
  3. Deploying your workloads.
  4. Optimizing your environment and workloads.

This journey isn't unique to Google Cloud. Moving from one environment to another is a challenging task, so you need to plan and execute your migration carefully. No matter what you're migrating—whether apps, VMs, or containers—you need to complete tasks such as creating an inventory, establishing user and service identities, deploying your workloads, and optimizing for performance and scalability.

Design of the series

To design and plan the Migration to Google Cloud, the Migrating VMs with Migrate to VMs, the Migrating containers to Google Cloud, and the Migrating VMs to containers with Migrate to Containers series, we used software design paradigms and strategies that are common in object-oriented programming (OOP).

You can use the concepts of OOP to think about the recommendations in each of the series. This document is like your software documentation when you're developing an application: it guides you through your journey, offering direction along the way.

The following simplified UML class diagram illustrates the relationships between the documents in the Migration to Google Cloud, the Migrating your VMs with Migrate to VMs, and the Migrating containers to Google Cloud series:

Relationship between documents as a UML class diagram.

In the preceding diagram, the series maps to a UML class diagram in the following ways.

The Migration to Google Cloud series includes the following documents:

The concepts that are explored throughout the Migration to Google Cloud series are extended and applied to the following series to give more prescriptive guidance for specific use cases and environments:

The logic that is applied in the diagram can be extended to other workloads. For example, by using the assessment, planning, deployment, and optimization phases, you can modernize your CI/CD pipelines when you migrate them to Google Cloud.

What's next