Migrating to AWS Cloud PT2

As we continue down the cloud journey a very common use case I tend to see in the field is “lift and shift” of business applications to the cloud. If you refer to the previous article, that is typically a customer’s first venture into the cloud.

There are many reasons why businesses migrate applications to the cloud, but for today’s sake we will assume that you know why.

Today we will review a real life scenario where a customer is migrating a standard application to the cloud.

Project:

Migration of on premise Workloads running in a Corporate Data Center to AWS using the Amazon EC2 and RDS service

Project Description:

In this scenario, I act as the Cloud Specialist responsible for migrating a workload running in a Corporate DataCenter to AWS.
The application and database were migrated to AWS using the Lift & Shift method, moving both application and database data.

I followed some key migration steps: Planning (sizing, prerequisites, resource naming), Execution (resource provisioning, best practices), Go-live (validation test — Dry-run, final migration — Cutover) and Post Go-live (ensure the operation of the application and user access).

Below is an example of the migration plan and the steps needed to complete the lift and shift of the application:

1. Sizing exercise. View the resources on-premises and use this as a guideline on what to build in the cloud.
2. Export the data dump from the DB and the application deployment to retain the same application functions in the cloud.
3. Migrate the data to a S3 bucket so the refactored application can access historical data.
4. Create a VPC where our newly spun up instances can communicate with each other.
5. Import the deployment files onto our newly created EC2 instance and the dump file from the on-premise DB to our RDS instance.
6. Confirm connectivity between the cloud resources.

BONUS! If you have access to the necessary tools, your migration of applications can become even more optimized. For instance, using LogicMonitor we are able to help businesses properly size resources in the cloud by using historical data to give us insight into resource utilization over a period of time. Now we’re able to not just “lift and shift” an application to the cloud, but we optimally size our application for cost and scalability. Below is an example dashboard in LogicMonitor that tracks resource utilization and tells us if the VMs are over/under provisioned.

In conclusion, there are many ways to migrate to applications to AWS, however this one of the fundamental methods leveraged by many companies today. Hopefully this provides some insight into the process.

Until next time!!