Cloud migration Quiz

As part of a newly-formed cloud migration team of a MNC, your role requires you to write an executive summary paper for the migration project to be presented to the senior management team.

In the paper you should highlight this migration project as being part of a:

• Business project aligning to the corporation’s growth strategy.

• Business change request to reduce project capital investment cost.

• Technology improvement to reduce IT expenses.

• Break-fix to improve agility of software development.

While architecting a new cloud application storing and processing credit card data including sensitive authentication data (SAD), you have decided to choose a cloud service provider that has been certified with level 1 PCI DSS. The SAD data will be stored in this public cloud but made available as part of the same application to an on-prem server. As the CSP holds the highest level of PCI assessment, it will automatically imply that the application is PCI DSS compliant as well. As such you are not required to obtain a separate compliance certification. What is wrong with this assumption?

• This is wrong as you must manage your own PCI DSS compliance certification, and additional testing will be required to verify that the entire architecture satisfies all PCS DSS requirements.

• This is wrong as PCI DSS requires that the data be stored in a single-tenant cloud environment and not in a public cloud for the on-prem application to connect to.

• This is wrong as no-one should even consider storing sensitive authentication data in the cloud.

• Nothing is wrong here. Level 1 is the highest compliance clearance and is aligned to what the application is designed to achieve.

You are part of a cloud migration team and the project manager of this migration team has been tasked to provide a list of project KPIs for the management to keep track on the progress of the migration. You have enthusiastically volunteered to provide an initial list of KPIs for the migration team. Which of the following KPI should you exclude from the list?

• Schedule performance index.

• Cost performance index.

• Number of workloads migrated to the cloud.

• Return on investment measure.

In a typical pre-deployment checklist, we should consider project activities in the following categories: Process, technology, data, security, governance and physical, to ensure a smooth transition of our application portfolio to the cloud environment.

What other purpose this checklist might serve?

• As cloud is all about infrastructure service, this checklist can help the existing infrastructure team to operate cloud services alongside legacy services.

• As existing applications need only be refactored at the application and not the infrastructure layer to align to the capacity requirement of the cloud, the checklist can be used to determine additional migration workload in the future.

• A heavily automated agile operating model for the cloud will require less cross-functional teams and such checklist will help to provide guidance to each team responsible for process, technology, data, security and governance respectively.

• As migration to the cloud should be done in a progressive manner, this checklist can be reused for future workloads deployment.

Cloud native application development improves software performance by connecting a microservices architecture through an API platform. Such architecture follows the concept of loose coupling as components are independent and changes in one will not impact the others. In developing new cloud native applications, it is always advisable to standardize an internal governance and life-cycle standards on all the APIs.

Which of the following should you consider to be part of this standard?

• Heavily customize new REST API for each application.

• Build new REST API for every new cloud deployment or migration.

• Front-end team to customize new server-side REST API for their need.

• Use a platform approach to all RESTful services so API can be reused.

While testing the migration of new workloads to the cloud, which of the following is a good practice?

• Operating, governance and security model for the new workloads should only be considered right after testing the migration.

• With Agile scrum deployed to refactor the new workload, testing will not be required prior to deployment.

• Utilize the power of cloud, use scripts to model and provision both for testing and automating the build and migration.

• Amount of testing will largely depend on the migration model of the new workloads, rebuilding with the full-cycle ALM will require the least amount of testing.

You are newly recruited to a cloud migration team that is part of a larger initiative of the company to implement DevOps and Agile scrum methodology. Which of the following will potentially create the best value for the company when migrating a portion of the current application portfolio to the cloud?

• Taking a step at a time, adopt cloud technology only after the completion of DevOps implementation and followed by Agile deployment.

• Best value for the company can be attained by moving the entire application portfolio instead of just a portion of it, as cloud technology provide OpEx cost management which will consistently lead to higher ROI.

• Consider starting with a small brand-new cloud native application using DevOps and Agile as the first step to build up the necessary cloud skillset and culture.

• Since the current monolithic and top-down ITIL management framework works well for the company in the past years, the new cloud operation should follow these framework entirely to create the biggest value.

As part of a cloud migration team, you need to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) for one of the applications in scope. As you are planning to migrate this workload to the AWS cloud with heavy automation, you have chosen to use the cost calculator provided by Amazon through their site https://awstcocalculator.com. Through the website you’ve chosen specifically the EC2 dedicated host as you are moving the web service to a resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Happy with the estimation provided through this website, you have then given the same exact number to the project manager. This is not an accurate estimation because:

• With heavy automation the actual cloud operation cost will always be higher than the estimation.

• There are other costs such as risk and migration cost which should be included.

• With all the questions on the compute and storage capacity answered diligently, the estimator will provide a highly accurate cost for the migration.

• When we compare just the plain infrastructure cost for hosting the application, cloud will always be cheaper thus the estimation will not be accurate.

As part of a cloud migration project, you have decided to rehost (lift and shift) a small on-prem application to the cloud. This application is tightly coupled with other on-prem peripheral systems. As this application was developed and architected with security by design using ASP.NET under a classic model-view-controller (MVC) framework, which of the following testing you could in fact omit when migrating this application to the cloud?

• All testings must be executed given all the information in the scenario.

• No testing is required as this is a rehost (lift and shift) migration.

• Functional testing as this was modelled using MVC.

• Report testing as this was built with ASP.NET.

As part of the ‘Analyze’ phase of the 4 ‘A’s cloud migration process, you should attempt to draft the to-be architecture diagram, which is a representation of the entire application landscape, their interrelationships and components based on the recommended migration models and applications in scope for the migration. What type of applications should you consider to prioritize for this migration while analyzing the as-is architecture diagram?

• Applications that were architected using the TOGAF framework.

• Applications that were architected using the SABSA security framework.

• Loosely-coupled and high cohesion applications.

• Tightly-coupled and low cohesion applications.