AWS Cloud Migration

Migrations to AWS include moving any workload — application, website, database, storage, physical or virtual server, or an entire data center — from an on-premises environment, hosting facility, or other public cloud to AWS.

Need for Migration

Business is no easy task when it comes to handling situations like security, scaling up or down, etc. Let’s look at a few scenarios where AWS Migration could be a better resort.

1. Your project has started receiving a high volume of traffic overnight
2. Your clients want fast application implementation and deployment
3. It’s becoming expensive to manage the growing database needs
4. You are cautious about the mishap of data center going down

If you Migrate to Cloud then the problems mentioned above will get handled automatically.Let’s move further and understand what is Migration.

What is Migration?

Migrating your project means moving your data from the on-premise data center to cloud. FYI we are not referring to clouds in the sky. In this case, cloud is the virtualization used over a data center to make the functionalities more flexible.Many companies like GoDaddy, Expedia etc., have recently moved their business to cloud.

Some of the key drivers to moving to cloud is

• Operational Costs– Key components of operational costs are unit price of infrastructure, the ability to match supply and demand, finding a pathway to optionality, employing an elastic cost base, and transparency
• Workforce Productivity– getting up and ready in seconds and various service availability.
• Cost Avoidance– eliminating the need for hardware refresh programs and constant maintenance programs
• Operational Resilience increases resilience and thereby reducing organization’s risk profile
• Business Agility– react to market conditions more quickly

Cloud Stages of Adoption

PROJECT

• In the project phase, execute projects to get familiar and experience benefits from the cloud.

FOUNDATION

• After experiencing the benefits of cloud, build the foundation to scale the cloud adoption.
• This includes creating a landing zone (a pre-configured, secure, multi-account AWS environment), Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), operations model, as well as assuring security and compliance readiness.

MIGRATION

• Migrate existing applications including mission-critical applications or entire data centers to the cloud as you scale your adoption across a growing portion of the IT portfolio.

REINVENTION

• Now that the operations are in the cloud, focus on reinvention by taking advantage of the flexibility and capabilities of AWS to transform business by speeding time to market and increasing the attention on innovation.

Migration Process

Phase 1: Migration Preparation and Business Planning

• Determine the right objectives and begin to get an idea of the types of benefits you will see.
• Starts with some foundational experience and developing a preliminary business case for a migration, which requires taking objectives into account, along with the age and architecture of the existing applications, and their constraints.

Phase 2: Portfolio Discovery and Planning

• Understand the IT portfolio, the dependencies between applications, and begin to consider what types of migration strategies needed to meet the business case objectives.
• With the portfolio discovery and migration approach, you are in a good position to build a full business case.

Phase 3 & Phase 4: Designing, Migrating, and Validating Application

• Move focus from the portfolio level to the individual application level and design, migrate, and validate each application.
• Each application is designed, migrated, and validated according to one of the six common application strategies (“The 6 R’s”).
• Once you have some foundational experience from migrating a few apps and a plan in place that the organization can get behind — it’s time to accelerate the migration and achieve scale.
• AWS provides migration services that help for moving applications and data from on-premises to AWS –AWS Server Migration Service (SMS),AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

Phase 5: Operate

• Once applications are migrated, iterate on the new foundation, turn off old systems, and constantly iterate toward a modern operating model.
• Operating model becomes an evergreen set of people, process, and technology that constantly improves as you migrate more applications.

Application Migration Strategies

Migration strategies depend upon what is in your environment and the what is suitable for the portfolio, taking into account the business and technical requirements.

Below are the Six common migration strategies employed and build upon “The 5 R’s” that Gartner outlined in 2011.

1. Rehost (“lift and shift”)

• Moving your application as is to the Cloud.
• You have your application ready and working then you can simply Rehost it on AWS.
• Helps to quickly implement the migration and scale to meet a business case
• Provides better opportunity for re-architect the applications once they are already running in cloud, with the organization having already developed cloud skills and the application with its data is migrated and handling traffic.
• Rehosting can be automated with tools such as AWS Server Migration Service, or can be done manually

2. Replatform (“lift, tinker and shift”)

• Moving your application to the Cloud with optimizations, without any major changes.
• Replatform helps achieve some tangible benefit without changing the core architecture of the application. For e.g., using RDS for database or Elastic Beanstalk for applications.
• You have an outdated version of your application running on your hosting environment so you have to modify your application and then Rehost it.

3. Repurchase (“drop and shop”)

• Dropping the application and Moving to a complete new Solution
• More of an Buy in a Build vs Buy model, might be expensive in short team but faster time to market.
• Move to a different product, which likely means the organization is willing to change the existing used licensing model

4. Refactor / Re-architect

• Moving the application to Cloud, with major changes.
• More of a Build in a Build vs Buy model, and would take time.
• driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance with agility and improvement in business continuity that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment.
• You want to add up new features, scale up the limits of the existing business model and performance that are difficult with the existing environment.

5. Retire

• Decommission the applications, not needed anymore.
• Identifying IT assets that are no longer useful and can be turned off will help boost your business case and direct your attention towards maintaining the resources that are widely used.
• After AWS Migration you can differentiate between useful and useless resources. Hence, you cut off all the resources that are no longer useful to the business and build a strategy around the new resources

6. Retain

• Keep the applications as it is in the current environment.
• Retain portions of the IT portfolio, which have tight dependencies, difficult, not in priority or ready for migration

Benefits Of AWS MigrationAWS Migration gives your organization limitless benefits. Let’s look into the major ones in brief.

Elasticity:-Adding and Removing capacity whenever it is needed is the greatest benefits of elasticity.

Disaster Recovery:-With a 99.95% guaranteed uptime, businesses can be confident knowing that their data will always be available.

Enhanced Cost Management:-The IaaS platform provides two major benefits. First, an IaaS such as Amazon Web Services is available as a monthly service. Secondly, it eliminates the need to continue to purchase and maintain physical hardware.These were the benefits of AWS Migration.Let’s jump into the services offered by AWS to ease the process of Migration.

Services For AWS Migration

Out of the many tools provided by Amazon to automate data migration, I’ll be talking about the more commonly used ones.

AWS Migration hub:AWS provides a single location for tracking Migration process. Migration Hub gives you the freedom to choose the Migration partner and tools that fit your needs.

AWS Server Migration service (SMS):

AWS SMS is an agentless service that helps migrate loads of on-premise workload to AWS easier and faster. It allows you to automate Migration and track replication of Server. It makes coordinating with your large scale-server Migration easy.

Amazon S3 transfer acceleration:

This makes the transfer of files over long range to AWS S3 bucket faster and secure.

AWS Snowball:It is a petabyte-scale data transfer solution that uses secure devices to transfer a large amount of data in and out of AWS.

AWS Snowmobile:

It is an exabyte scale data transfer solution to move an extremely large amount of data to AWS. Snowmobile makes the transfer of massive volumes of data easier.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose:

It is the easiest out of all the methods. It can capture and automatically load streaming data into Amazon S3. You can analyze real-time data to get timely insights of Migration.

Now that you know everything about AWS, andAWS Migration, let me show you a use case where you will be migrating a Virtual OS from my local machine to AWS Cloud.