Solving the challenge of legacy applications in the cloud

As more enterprises in more industries turn to cloud solutions, we are seeing an increase in certain kinds of challenges. One that is particularly interesting involves moving legacy applications to a cloud environment.

The challenge of legacy applications gets to the heart of some of the key differences between a cloud solution and traditional solution. One great advantage of the cloud is that it disconnects the dependency between this specific application and that specific hardware. In the cloud, applications usually do not live or die because of a specific piece of hardware.

The role of hardware

However, legacy applications actually can live or die because of a specific piece of hardware. Pre-cloud, the way you met the demand for application reliability and availability was, in no small part, by running the application on reliable hardware. If you had a mission-critical application, you would turn to best-in-breed server hardware. Similarly, you would design in redundancy through redundant power feeds, redundant server power supplies, multiple network interfaces and redundant switch infrastructure.

The focus on using only the highest-quality physical components does not apply in public cloud environments. Public cloud is built on low-cost commodity hardware, designed with the fault domain at the rack level, with the expectation that all servers in a single rack will and do fail. The availability/reliability strategy for public cloud is to address redundancy at the software level.

Read the entire article here, Solving the challenge of legacy applications in the cloud

via the fine folks at Dell