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## Assessing workloads 

When considering a migration to a cloud environment, you need to know which applications transition easily and give you the best return on investment (ROI). Assessing potential workloads is key to understanding what you should migrate and what should remain in a traditional IT environment. 

Many kinds of workloads are far from static and predictable. Workloads generally have a stable base but experience minor fluctuations and occasional peaks. The peaks may be seasonal in nature or triggered by a business event (such as a product launch), a sudden change in market conditions, or a product recall. 

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To manage all these capacity requirements without having to invest in excess capacity, you need to plan ahead and decide which workloads can be moved to a dynamic infrastructure. Some vendors, such as IBM, provide workload assessment tools and services, to help prioritize and classify potential workloads for cloud delivery. After selecting inputs in a spreadsheet-like form, the tool gives you a pain versus gain score that reflects a combination of effort (to migrate), investment, and benefit of migration. 

## Using a cost estimator tool 

A number of cloud providers and vendors offer calculators for helping you estimate charges for their services or to help you estimate the cost savings from cloud computing services. Some vendors provide monthly calculators for their web services. 

For example, a calculator may ask you a series of questions about the number of compute instances, storage needs, data transfer, load balancing, and IPs needed and then provide you with a monthly estimate. Of course, your monthly usage and, therefore, the charges may vary from the estimates that the calculator provides. 

Other vendors may offer total cost of ownership (TCO) calculators. These calculators may ask you a series of 

