When you want, need or are forced to leave an American cloud provider

Exit process

Here is a list of some of the things you could consider in the Exit process:

1. Document which American cloud services you use.
2. Document which kind of services you buy. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or other XaaS?
3. Document what kind of data is stored and processed in the services.
4. Try to read the contract(s). They are often very long, very complex, very unfriendly to the customer and not always complete though.
   1. What kinds of rights do you have to your data and metadata?
   2. Can you extract everything?
   3. In which formats can you get the data and metadata?
   4. Is it possible to reuse the data and metadata without loss?
5. If you use compute instances and S3 storage, the process should be quite straightforward and there should not be any data loss.
6. If you use Kubernetes and containers, there are some pitfalls, but you should be able to migrate without data loss.
7. If you are the developer behind a SaaS that uses someone else’s Iaas/PaaS then your mileage will vary a lot depending on how locked in you are to functions only available from one cloud provider. In this case it might be necessary to change your application so that it can run in any standard cloud environment. This will be beneficial for you in the long run anyway. :)
8. Networking is key. When migrating between platforms it is important to be able to handle the transition. That could be done by setting up an overlay network that spans both the platforms. In this way each function can be migrated with minimal impact.