Mergers can be dynamic events. The Charter Communications acquisition of Time Warner Cable was no exception. A debate over the future cloud strategy created a need to abandon the TWC OpenStack cloud without negative impact to current users. This was new territory for the operations team. The team had been doubling the cloud capacity yearly for the prior two years. These are lessons learned in sunsetting an OpenStack cloud with some Cloud Migration.
Questions to consider:
- Do all work loads transition to a new infrastructure? How do you decide?
- Attrition risks of key people. Who do you need to be successful?
- What are the critical tasks that are the long schedule items?
- How will you measure success?
- What is failure in transitioning?
Important to note: This presentation is good for those transitioning TO a private OpenStack cloud from something else, exiting an OpenStack Cloud, as well as VERY GOOD ADVICE for those running in production a multi-tenant private OpenStack cloud.
Some key take-aways that we will examine:
- Cloud Migration Project and Operations:
- Planning
- Can you describe your work to non-cloud stakeholders?
- What metrics will describe success?
- How to keep the quality up and prove it?
- Customers:
- Reorganization can destroy a successful application team. How to help the new people get up to speed?
- Hand-holding required to allow you to meet your goal.
- OpenStack Operations team:
- Morale
- Team dynamics
- Expectations
- Technical:
- Network
- Replacement services
- Data migrations
- Credentials
- Roles
