Migration to AWS i.e. Amazon Web Services cloud involves the shifting of any workload from its on-premise environment, ordinary public cloud, or hosting facility to AWS cloud. Today, AWS works with a large number of companies and organizations to migrate their workloads. These include websites, applications, storage, databases, virtual or physical servers, or complete data centres.
Why Migration to AWS is Preferable
AWS cloud migration gives unlimited benefits to your business organizations. A few of them include the following-
- Gives Elasticity
The addition and removal of extra capacity, whenever it becomes essential, is one of the prime benefits for an organization, as it gives elasticity.
- Improves Cost Management
The innovative IaaS platform like for instance Amazon Web Services is available in the form of monthly service and it eliminates the need to buy or maintain any physical hardware. Both of these aspects benefit organizations that choose to migrate their apps to the AWS cloud.
- Assurance of Disaster Recovery
With guaranteed uptime of more than 99percent, business organizations get enough confidence by knowing about the round-the-clock availability of their crucial data.
Phases to Migrate On-premise Apps to AWS Cloud
Moving on-premise apps and organizational data to AWS cloud is a complicated task, as it involves the involvement of different phases. Let us discuss the different phases of migration, which helps in a successful migration.
Phase 1-Identify the Apps, which You Have to Shift to Cloud
Many times, you do not need to shift your complete business to the cloud platform. Instead, you have to segregate and identify only those applications, which you have to migrate to AWS cloud or the ones, which can migrate to the cloud easily. Accordingly, you have to select the applications, which-
- Fulfil the success criteria
- Allow easy migration
- Relatively less to cause failure
Phase 2-Select a Specific Migration Method
Amazon Web Services offer various ways to migrate your data or applications depending on its nature. Hence, once you select the type of data and the right data to move them, you have to search for the available resources you need to do so.
Phase 3-Search for the Proof of Concept for AWS Cloud Storage
You have to find out the places and the methods to store the migrated apps. You have to keep in mind that the main motive to shift to AWS is to reduce your expenses. Accordingly, you have to test each of the workloads of your organization and understand the AWS storage well. Especially, you have to check the security controls, benefits, and limits of a particular Amazon Storage Service.
Phase 4-Migrate Your Applications to AWS
In this phase, you already have various prerequisites, such as migration tools, assignment lists, data backups, and data synchronization with the on-premise data repositories. Hence, you may migrate your existing project or applications to AWS cloud and thereby, expect to avail of benefits in the form of durability and reliability.
Phase 5-Track the System Upgrades and Maintenance After Migration
After you migrate the on-premise apps to the AWS cloud, Amazon Web Services will give you regular updates, which you have to include in your existing cloud architecture. In this situation, organizations must make sure to have a round-the-clock support team to track both upgrades and maintenance of the respective systems after migration.
Strategies to Migrate On-premise Applications
Organizations should essentially remember that migration of each of their business applications is not easy. Instead, a few of the applications, especially the legacy apps have a complex structure. Indeed, you have to follow certain strategies, which refer to 6 Rs of AWS application migration strategies.
Strategy 1-Rehost
Rehost is also known as the Lift and Shift strategy and it is useful when your business application is already ready to migrate. Accordingly, you have to lift your applications and services from the existing host environment and shift them to AWS cloud with the help of a third-party exporting tool.
Strategy 2-Re-platform
If your organization has an outdated version of the business application operating on the hosting environment, you have to modify and rehost it. Re-platform is a medication of Rehost strategy. This strategy optimizes the existing cloud architecture to provide benefits without changing the basic structure of your application.
Strategy 3-Repurchase
There are a few of the business applications, which may be incompatible with the updated architecture. In this situation, you have to buy a new application to make it compatible with the new cloud architecture. AWS marketplace has varieties of services even with the model of pay according to your usage. Experts refer to the Repurchase strategy as a drop and shop strategy. Here, you get a chance to upgrade, accomplish easy implementation, and accept the updated architecture while changing to your existing model.
Strategy 4-Refactor
Organizations may have to add new features, enhance the limits of their existing performance and business model but face difficulty to do so with the existing environment. In this situation, you must adopt the Refactor strategy, you must reconsider your requirements and shift your business to any service-oriented architecture. Even though the strategy is relatively expensive, it will improve your business apps and benefit your organization in the future.
Strategy 5-Retire
Once you are done with AWS Migration, you may easily differentiate between useless and useful apps/resources. Hence, you have to apply the Retire strategy and cut off all sorts of useless resources related to your resources. Instead, you have to formulate innovative strategies by considering new resources for your business to reduce your extra cost. With a limited number of things to bother about, you may easily focus on maintaining only the useful resources of your new business model.
Strategy 6-Retain
Finally, you have to create a strategy to retain your existing business applications, which as per your organization’s model are not yet prepared to migrate to the AWS cloud, or the applications, which underwent recently.
Conclusion
Migration to AWS Cloud gives plenty of benefits to your organization. This gives your business a scalable solution to meet both storage and computing needs. AWS cloud lets us increase the overall performance and service availability drastically. However, organizations must follow the right strategies and move through the right phases to migrate to the AWS cloud in a hassle-free way.
Author Profile:
Martin Moyers is a business analyst and an avid tech blogger who is associated with Zymr, Inc. He is obsessed with AI-ML, cloud technologies, and the universe of social media. In his leisure time, he enjoys rafting, sailing, and hiking.
