MIGRATION TO AWS

Traditionally companies hosted their IT infrastructure, software applications and databases in on-premises servers in their local datacentres or in some third-party datacentres. Although this practice seemed like a feasible solution, in the past few years’ companies have adopted cloud services and solutions, plus the demand to migrate their on-premises infrastructure to cloud and the need to leverage new technologies to cater to their business continuity/efficiency has been soaring high. And the reason for this rapid shift in the hosting approach is due to some of the common challenges faced by the customers in their on-premises environment.
Following are some of the common concerns of hosting on-premises:

Increased IT cost

Setting up on-premises datacentre requires capital investment in hardware, software, and infrastructure. On-premises infrastructure’s hardware can reach end of life and might require the need to upgrade.

Maintenance and Upkeep

Once the datacentre is up and running, it requires ongoing maintenance and upkeep, including software updates and hardware upgrades. This also increase costs.

Limited Scalability option

On-premises datacentre are often limited in their scalability, as it requires purchasing and installing new hardware. This can be a major challenge for organizations in response to changes their business needs.

Lack of Disaster Recovery option

On-premises datacentre are vulnerable to natural disasters, power outage and other unexpected events that can disrupt operations and cause data loss.

Having End-of-Life Concerns

Many organizations want to free themselves from the rigid licensing agreements and contracts for their critical hardware and software setup. And they don’t want to deal with the application life cycles or to sign any inflexible contractual terms as it slows down their business efficiency.

AWS MIGRATION PHASES

Let’s discuss the basic migration phases and the tools used in this migration process. The On-Premises to AWS migration can be done in five phases as mentioned below.

PHASE ONE: ASSESS

The first phase of migration journey from on-premises to AWS cloud is the assessment phase, during which an organization's readiness for the cloud will be determined by conducting a rapid discovery and evaluation of its on-premises environment. This includes:

• Network analysis on the On-Premises environment.

• Gathers inventory data and application interdependencies between them.

• TCO comparison between on-premises environment and AWS Cloud.

• Relevant AWS migration strategy and the tool / service used to migrate their on-premises workload will be determined.

• Cloud Readiness assessment and action plan to close identified gaps.

• Business usecase creation

PHASE TWO: MOBILIZE

The Mobilization phase is the second major step in the AWS Migration process. This includes:

• Proof of Concept which provides real-migration experience.

• Detailed migration plan and migration wave group will be determined.

• Landing zone setup

• Establish Security best practices and Cloud Operating model.

• Improvements based on the AWS WAR reports.

PHASE THREE: MIGRATE AND MODERNIZE

Once the resources and other workload have been defined in the plan and ready phase, the next step is the Migration phase. In this phase,

• The workload from on-premises to AWS cloud will be migrated based on migration wave plan.

• During the Migrate phase, every organization must validate the performance level of the workload that migrated, and it is functioning as acceptable.

After the Migrate phase, the next step is the Modernization phase which is the process of improving the migrated workload take full advantage of AWS services. AWS provides AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to modernize their applications and organizations can migrate the workload to a container – based architecture to achieve better performance, improve efficiency and reduce costs.

PHASE FOUR: OPERATE

After successful migration, it is advised to make sure to establish proactive monitoring processes. The goal is to ensure your application performs well in the cloud; using the expected resources and without incurring overhead. This includes,

• Effective continuous monitoring

• Best practices recommendations

• Change Management

• Patch Management

• Security Management

PHASE FIVE: OPTIMIZE

For organizations to maximize long-term value, cloud optimization focuses on the key areas of utilization, cost, and security; this cannot be done solely through monitoring and troubleshooting. Optimization is a continuous cycle where intelligence drives automation to make sure cloud environments are always secure, performant, and no underutilized resources persists. This includes,

• Utilization monitoring

• database performance tuning and monitoring

• Re-engineering wherever requires

• Implement new features and services

• Configuration of alerts

AWS MIGRATION STRATEGIES:

Amazon recommends seven migration strategies in different ways.

Retire (decommission)

• This is the process of decommissioning the applications on on-premises which are no longer necessary.

Retain (re-visit)

• Retaining is the process of maintaining some applications on on-premises and no need to migrate for now. Customer might choose to migrate in future accordingly.

Re-host (lift and shift)

• This is the strategy which involves the as-is migration of moving existing on-premises to cloud without any little modification.

Re-locate

• Relocation is the process of moving the workloads from on-premises platform to a cloud version of the platform. For example, you can use this strategy to transfer servers in bulk from VMware software-defined data center (SSDC) to VMware Cloud on AWS.

Re-platform (lift and reshape)

• This is the process of lifted, making some changes on the application code, and shift to AWS to use PaaS offerings or AWS managed services like Amazon RDS.

Re-purchase (replace - drop and shop)

• Repurchasing involves replacing the existing applications by using Software-as-a-service (SaaS) or the products available on AWS marketplace.

Re-factor (re-architect)

• Refactoring refers to the process of redesigning the applications to take full advantages of AWS services by using serverless computing or container-based services.