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You’ve made it to Azure, congrats! But the work doesn’t end at the migration cutover. Just like brewing the perfect beer, making the most of your cloud involves a few finishing touches.

In this post, we’ll explore the best practices for optimising your resources post-migration, ensuring your workloads are not only running but thriving in Azure.

Post-Migration Optimisation Strategies

Once your workloads are running in Azure, it’s vital to evaluate their performance, security, and cost implications. Here are key strategies for maintaining optimal operations.

1. Cost Management and Optimization

• Utilise the Azure Cost Management Tool
  Implement Azure Cost Management to monitor spending and budget effectively. Set alerts for unused or under-utilised resources to avoid surprises.

• FinOps You’ve probably heard about FinOps, if you haven’t then you should checkout FinOps.org

• Show Back or Charge Back Many organisations consider implementing show back or charge back models after migrating to Azure, providing clearer visibility into consumption and costs. While not suited for every business, it can be valuable for understanding service usage.

• Right-Sizing Resources
  Use Azure Advisor to analyse VM sizes based on historical usage data. Adjust VM types and sizes to avoid over-provisioning or under-utilisation.

• Use Reserved Instances
  For critical workloads that will run continuously, consider purchasing reserved instances for a cost-efficient pricing model. This reduces overall expenditure significantly compared to pay-as-you-go pricing.

2. Performance Monitoring

• Azure Monitor and Application Insights
  Leverage Azure Monitor and Application Insights to track application performance and identify bottlenecks. Implement alerts to proactively address issues.

• Deployment Slots for App Services
  Use deployment slots to conduct application testing in a staging environment, ensuring performance remains smooth during updates or new deployments.

• SQL Performance Just as with on-prem SQL, you still need to monitor performance in Azure. Closely track query lengths, execution times, and overall optimization through the Azure portal for better efficiency.

3. Security Improvements

• Azure Security Center
  Enable Azure Security Center to get continuous security assessments and recommendations. Ensure security policies are configured, and alerts set for any suspicious activities.

• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
  Regularly review RBAC settings in Entra ID to ensure users have the minimum permissions required for their roles. This enhances security by following the principle of least privilege.

• Defender for Cloud Now you’ve migrated you should investigate uplifting your security to be aligned with your new environment this includes security of resources, resource manager, VM’s and SQL vulnerabilities etc.

4. Backup and Disaster Recovery

• Azure Backup Solution
  Implement Azure Backup for critical workloads to ensure data protection. Regularly test recovery processes to ensure you can restore key applications in case of incidents.

• Design for resilience If you have completed a lift-n-shift to get into Azure and plan on rebuilding some of your environment design with resilience in mind ensuring that you design for failure which ensures when failure occurs you’re already covered.

• Site Recovery for Business Continuity
  Utilize Azure Site Recovery to replicate workloads to ensure business continuity and minimize downtime in the event of a system failure.

5. Continuous Improvement

• Regularly Review Resource Utilization
  Set a cadence for regular reviews of resource usage and performance metrics. Adjust your cloud architecture based on evolving organisational needs and user feedback.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) We can now leverage a more DevOps centric environment as cloud and platform engineers and move away from Click-Ops to IaC to ensure we deploy new resources or re-deploy existing resources consistently. This allows for better operational management and enhances change control within a cloud environment.

• Feedback Loops
  Encourage feedback from your teams working on migrated applications, and iterate based on their input for further optimization.

Real-World Case Study: Not-for-Profit Organisation

Our ongoing example of the Sydney-based not-for-profit showcases the impact of post-migration optimisation:

• Cost changes were immediately tracked using Azure Cost Management; they reclaimed over 15% in unnecessary expenses through more efficient VM sizing.
• Using Azure Security Center, they identified and resolved several potential vulnerabilities within weeks of migration.
• Show back was implemented by implementing a clear and consistent resource tagging structure. Now they have been able to demonstrate the cost of IT back to the business for more clarity and transparency from IT back to the business.

Gotchas & Edge Cases

• Hidden Costs: Even with reserved instances, data egress charges can surprise organisations. Monitor these costs closely.
• Slow Adoption of Changes: Teams may resist shifting from on-premises mindsets to cloud-native operational practices, leading to slower adoption of cloud features.
• Infrequent Backups: Regularly validate your backup and disaster recovery solution; neglecting checks can lead to data loss.
• Resource Sprawl: Without a systematic approach, it’s easy to accumulate unused resources over time, driving costs up unnecessarily.

Brewed Take ☕

Learn More

• Azure Cost Management
• Azure Monitor Overview
• Azure Security Center