A design study on the migration of an on-premise software application to the cloud

Abstract

This research paper aims to highlight two things; the difference in development time when migrating an on-premise application to the cloud with two different migration strategies and the performance of the application after migration with the two strategies. This design study features an experience report where the two migration strategies are evaluated in the aspect of development time. The experience report serves to answer research question 1; “What are the differences between the rehosting (lift-and-shift) strategy and the refactoring (making it cloud native) strategy in the aspect of development time?”. Research question 2; “How will the performance of the application differ after being migrated to the cloud using the rehosting (lift-and-shift) strategy and the refactoring (to cloud native) strategy?“ was answered by measuring execution time for the mobile applications methods. The study shows that although the development time for refactoring was longer than for rehosting, it did not differ as much as expected for inexperienced cloud platform users who are migrating a small 3-tier application. The refactored application performed better than the rehosted application in the method execution time tests.