One of my readers sent me this question:

Have you written something about assessment and planning for migration of traditional in-premise data center network to private or public cloud? There would be hundreds of things to check during assessment and then plan accordingly.

Academically, that’s a wrong way of approaching the problem. Ideally you’d automate application deployments – describe application requirements in manifests/recipes/playbooks/whatever, and use a tool that could deploy the application stack in your traditional data center (using vSphere and vCenter), in a private cloud (using vRealize and VMware NSX), or in a public cloud, creating all the necessary infrastructure (VMs, disks, virtual networks, security rules…) as part of the process.

I would usually mention Cloudify or Terraform when talking about such a magic tool. I know you could do the same thing (with a lot of legwork) in Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or any other automation or configuration management tool. Anything else I could recommend?

Unfortunately, trying to create deployment manifests for traditional enterprise applications usually turns into a Mission Impossible. Is there something else you could do to automate the migration into the cloud? Is there a tool that would help you with needs assessment and planning?

Please don’t mention kludges that emulate vSphere environment in public clouds (see also RFC 1925 rules 6 and 6a).