Anyone working in IT has heard the question, “is your application cloud ready?”. What on earth does it mean? What factors go into making an application “cloud” ready?
Applications can be architected in many different ways and there are arguably many factors that go into making an application “cloud” ready.
This post isn’t going to cover what those factors are. What’s more interesting to me is how to quickly figure out if an application is “cloud” ready. I have found that there are a series of questions that can be asked to quickly determine this.
This post will be an ever growing list of questions that can be asked to determine if an application is suitable to run in an OpenStack or cloud environment.
- Does the application require infrastructure level high availability features such as VMware HA? If yes, then the application is probably not a good fit for an OpenStack or cloud environment.
- Can the application horizontally scale? If no, then the application is probably not a good fit for an OpenStack or cloud environment.
- Is the application already deployed in a public cloud and will it stay running if some number of cloud servers/instances fail? If no to both questions, there is a possibility the application is not a good fit for an OpenStack or cloud environment.
- Does the application need to be contained in one virtual machine/server, or, in other words, is the application tightly coupled? If yes to both questions, then the application is probably not a good fit for an OpenStack or cloud environment.
- Does the application require an operating system such as RHEL 5 or older? If yes, then the application is probably not a good fit for an OpenStack cloud environment.
If you have additional questions that you have found useful, please post them in the comments and I will add them to the list.
