Many organizations are facing the challenge of migrating their IT to the cloud. But not many know how to actually approach this undertaking. In my previous post I took a hands-on example of SpringSource’s PetClinic reference application with a Tomcat web server front-end and a Cassandra NoSQL database backend and showed how to onboard it to the cloud in a manageable fashion. But many think this methodology is only good for modern applications that were built with some dynamic/cloud orientation in mind. For example, how different would the cloud on-boarding process be if I modify my PetClinic example to use a MySQL relational database instead of the modern Cassandra NoSQL clustered database? In this blog post I intend to show that cloud on-boarding of brownfield applications doesn’t have to be a huge monolithic migration project with high risk. Cloud on-boarding can take the pragmatic approach and can be performed in a gradual process that both mitigates the risk and enables you to enjoy the immediate benefits of automation and easier management of your application’s operational lifecycle even before moving to the cloud...