This week we're talking about AWS Migration.
AWS migration can seem like a daunting task, given all of the choices that Amazon offers. This week, we're going to talk a little bit about how to pare down those choices to best fit your business migration plans. If you're making this journey, you're not alone. Major companies such as GE, McDonald's and Capital One are migrating to the AWS cloud.
A complete migration plan is beyond the scope of this article, but we will cover the highlights including planning, storage options and strategies, and tools.
One of the first tasks in any migration scenario is coming up with a budget. Amazon has a number of tools to help you compute the anticipated costs of your migration, hosting and storage needs. You can also choose caps on usage and spending as well as setting up alerts as you near predetermined limits.
Considerations for your budget include whether to re-architect your system or migration it as-is. For your data, will you keep it onsite, move it to the cloud or use a hybrid solution? Another factor is whether to use Amazon's professional services or hire a consultant to assist with your migration. If you've never done a migration before, I highly recommend using either Amazon's professional services or a certified Amazon consultant. (See the link below for Amazon's Migration Acceleration Program if you plan on utilizing professional services.) Either way, one or two of your own personnel should be committed to the migration plan and serve as subject matter experts after the migration is complete.
Items to include in your planning include: applications, databases, data, monitoring, reporting and analytics, and support. Amazon will provide services for many of your needs (at a cost) or you can provide your own personnel to fill these needs. Amazon's services can be very cost-effective if you lack experienced personnel, but I would recommend that you have at least two employees that have enough knowledge and experience with Amazon services to serve as in-house support and to provide oversight.
Amazon has a number of storage options, including S3, Glacier, Snowball, and Elastic Block Store. S3 is the general-purpose object-based storage system. Glacier provides archival class storage for data that does not have to be immediately accessible. Snowball is a physical data storage system that enables secure physical transport of data. Elastic Block Store allows flexible storage solutions that grow with your data needs. It is designed to be used with Elastic Compute Cloud.
Data Migration and Connection Tools
Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration makes public Internet transfers to Amazon S3 faster. No special clients or proprietary network protocols are required. Simply change the endpoint you use with your S3 bucket and acceleration is automatically applied.
AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns.
AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. Snowmobile makes it easy to move massive volumes of data to the cloud, including video libraries, image repositories, or even a complete data center migration.
Direct Connect lets you establish a dedicated network connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations. This dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces. This allows you to use the same connection to access multiple public and private resources simultaneously while maintaining separate virtual networks.
Kinesis Firehose allows you to load streaming data into AWS. It can capture and automatically load streaming data into Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. If you need near real-time analytics, then this service is essential. It is a fully managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration. Batch processing, compression and encryption are options.
The above tools provide a number of options for moving data to Amazon and/or loading data onto Amazon on an ongoing basis.
Amazon has a number of guides, services and white papers to assist you with your migration planning.
AWS Application Discovery Service collects and presents configuration, usage, and behavior data from your servers to help you better understand your workloads.
Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
Track your migration progress on the Migration Hub.
An agentless service which makes it easier and faster for you to migrate on-premises workloads to AWS.
This Amazon service helps organizations develop an efficient and effective plan for their cloud adoption journey.
Automates the migration of applications from physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructure to AWS.
An online collection of available Amazon migration tools and services, many of which are listed here.
A PDF document detailing the EMR services designed to help migrate big data applications based on Hadoop and Spark.
Helps enterprises that are committed to a migration journey achieve a range of these business benefits by migrating existing workloads to Amazon Web Services. It includes a migration methodology for executing legacy migrations in a methodical way as well as robust set of tools to automate and accelerate common migration scenarios.
This service allows you to accurately assess your compute needs.
An integrated cloud offering jointly developed by AWS and VMware that allows organizations to seamlessly migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS Cloud running on next-generation Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) bare metal infrastructure.
As can be seen, there are several options and paths that you can take in your Amazon cloud migration journey. Fortunately, there are also a few online guides and tools to assist your planning as well as professional services to help with the actual migration. If you are migrating critical systems, I recommend running your current system in parallel with a migrated edition until you are sure that the migrated version is working as planned. Amazon also has a service that will run your applications in both areas while you migrate.
A lot of information is linked from this article. It may take a few passes before you narrow down the information you need for your specific migration process. You may wish to check out the recommended reading links at the bottom of this page. As you probably surmised by now, migration is not a simple process. However, it can be managed effectively with the right people and tools.
Until next time, thanks for Talking Technology with me!
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