Remember the movie What About Bob? with Bill Murray? The lead character, Bob Wiley, is stricken with fears about life. His psychiatrist advises him to constantly focus on “baby steps” to get through each day.

Cloud influencer and principal advisor at The Batchery Sarbjeet Johal (pictured), finds himself in a position similar to Bob’s shrink these days. Johal’s clients want to migrate to cloud, but they don’t know where to start and fear they’ll break something. So he councils them: Baby steps.

Brand new, cloud-native applications are a slam dunk in cloud; it’s legacy apps that might throw a temper tantrum in transition, according to Johal. Those are the ones companies are least comfortable shifting over to cloud.

“Nobody wants to pull the plug on existing applications,” Johal stated. “I’ve seen that time and again.” These applications are running in production, doing things that are crucial to the business. 

Companies can ease migration pains by starting with the easiest workloads to move and getting a feel for cloud first. “Your people and processes need to ease into using the cloud,” Johal stated.

Johal spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed cloud migration tips and consumption economics that ease users into cloud bit by bit. 

Migrate to the beat of your own drum

It’s important for companies to shush the hype around them. Other people’s reasons for moving to cloud don’t matter for them; they ought to migrate to the beat of their own drum, according to Johal.

Companies must determine their specific goal for migrating to the cloud? Then they can sift through workloads to find the easiest picks that move them toward the end goal.

“Do the application portfolio analysis first. You want to find the low-hanging fruit which can be moved to the cloud first,” he said. 

It would be a waste of time to makeover a legacy app before trying it out in cloud, Johal pointed out. “Migrate as is,” he advised. “Do not transform and migrate. Because if something is not working over there … or a performance problem or latency problem, you will blame it on your newer architecture.”

Migrating to cloud in micro chunks allows companies to avoid expensive blunders, according to Johal. Consumption Economics: The New Rules of Tech, by J. B. Wood, Thomas Lah and Todd Hewlin is a good read about OpEx consumption models, he advised.

Watch the entire video interview with Johal below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE