How to Migrate Your Database into AWS?

Your company needs to do an IT infrastructure modernization? Find some considerations here.

Are you an IT infrastructure manager who wants to start an IT infrastructure modernization in your company? You may need some consideration in choosing what cloud services are better to fulfill your company’s needs. One of the reliable cloud services is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Let’s take a look at it through this article.

AWS is a secure cloud service developed and managed by Amazon. It offers Amazon Simple Storage Services with 500 GB to 16 TB format sizes. Different from GCP, the data transmission in AWS is in general format. It also offers cloud-based disaster recovery services. As a platform, AWS is known as a more flexible, reliable, scalable, user-friendly, and cost-effective cloud computing service.

Here are some benefits of using AWS:

1. It offers an easy deployment process for an app
2. Suitable for configuration and infrastructure management
3. Suitable for projects that need high computing power
4. Improve productivity of the application dev team
5. Having automated functionality for configuration, scaling, setup, etc
6. Cost-effective, allows us to pay only for what we use, with no upfront or long-term commitments.
7. Quick cloud access and familiar programming models, operating systems, databases, and architectures.

Preparing the Migration

Cloud migration to AWS includes a movement of workloads like applications, websites, databases, storage, physical or virtual server, and all the data centers from local, hosting, to public cloud. Before migrating to AWS or any cloud computing system, it is important to assess the readiness of the organization for doing it. In this process, we need to identify the expected result for the business. AWS facilitates this process through some services like Migration Evaluator, AWS Migration Hub, and AWS Prescriptive Guidelines.

We also need to know what kind of data we want to migrate. Have a timeline and a plan for how we will use and migrate the data. Analyze the interdependence between applications and the database workload to decide the migration category from a simple re-hosting (homogeny) to architectural remigration (heterogony). Some big companies migrate the data sequentially. How many steps are needed in this migration process will depend on the size and complexity of the data, the number of users, and the types of data.

Planning It

In this phase, we use the information gathered in the preparation process and come up with the migration strategy. The most important aspect of the planning is rationalizing that information to 7 migration strategies: relocating, re-hosting, re-platforming, re-factoring, repurchasing, retiring, and maintaining. Which strategy is best for your business? It will depend on the business driver, time consideration, cost and business constraints, and also the human resources. It is illustrated in the diagram below:

Migration Process

After planning and making the migration strategy, the actual migration process is started. In this phase, the targeted database is designed, the data resources is migrated to the target, and it is validated.

This is a repeated process that includes some conversion cycles, migration, and testing. After the functionality and performance testing, you can come to the new database. The migration phase would consist of some key steps:

1. Changing the scheme
2. Data migration
3. Updating the apps
4. Migration testing
5. Cut to the new database

Operation and Optimization Process

When we are succeed to migrate our database into AWS, we started to work in the cloud. We need to do monitoring, alerting, backups, and high availability. The overhead operation will be different depending on the types of databases we had.

Rehosted databases may require higher operation overhead as it runs on an EC2. It needs us to be responsible for all the database management tasks. Meanwhile, re-platformed refactored databases were taken into Amazon RDS. It means that we will spend less time managing databases. Amazon RDS provides a performance monitoring tool that enables us to detect any problems.

In the operation and optimization phase, we will optimize the use of hosting AWS applications. It solved the problems related to costs, performance, security, and endurance of the applications. We need to pay attention to the monitoring, alerting, backups, and high availability processes. Whichever migration strategy you take, Amazon CloudWatch plays an important role in collecting key metrics such as CPU, memories, and I/O utilization.

After having in the AWSCloud, we can start to optimize our application by utilizing the services and features that we can play with some clicks.

https://aws.amazon.com/id/cloud-migration/how-to-migrate/?nc=sn&loc=2