Modifying software for the cloud

Question

We have a custom software project that's database driven (MySQL) and is built with php and some public and custom libraries.

It's currently being hosted on a VPS, and being the intern, I've been assigned the task of researching how we can transition it so it can be hosted in a cloud.

My research so far has led me to providers such as Amazon EC2, but they don't say much about the software side of things. Some of the literature suggests that it's not a simple matter of just moving the software to the cloud. It looks like modifications to the software need to be made. I'm not sure like what (do I need wrappers around it, or something like that)? I need some clues to get started in the right direction.

I'm planning to pick up a book on this topic, but I'm interested in hearing from others what standard changes we're likely to need to make for this use case.

Answer 1

"cloud" is a fancy word for VPS with some extra features like performance scaling without reboots and seamless migration from one hardware box to another. If your application works fine on VPS, I would not envision you will need to change anything.

The providers don't say much about the software side of the things, because from such a high-level environment like PHP and MySQL it makes no difference if you run it in VPS, bare iron or the cloud.

The only issue you may have is MySQL performance, but again, if you were fine with VPS you will be fine with the cloud.

Answer 2

This sounds like another case of the business heres a new tech word and says well why are we not doing that? This boils down to what do you want to benefit out of moving to the cloud? What type of application is this? Being you mention php and mysql I am assuming this is possibly your companies web application or intranet of some sort. The benefits of the cloud lie in scalability and computing resources provided on demand with additional abilities for redundancy in your data store.

Long story short though, with a web application you will not be much concerned with any of this when moving to the cloud as your scripts will run on your instance in the cloud and the cloud will handle resource allocation and what not.

Answer 3

Unless your software is very poorly written, there should be no concern about whether it runs on a VPS or in the cloud. In fact, your software likely wouldn't know the difference.

I've been assigned the task of researching how we can transition it so it can be hosted in a cloud.

You've jumped straight into questions about transitioning of software, which won't be an issue. Your boss may actually be more interested in finding out if a move to EC2 will impact: security (maybe), processes (maybe) and admin access to the box (maybe). It's hard to answer these questions, because they're usually dependent on your corporate policies.