The key to a successful migration is to ensure that you are migrating for the “right” reasons. Asking questions around your growth, scale, current pain points, executive buy in, etc. No “More mess for less”, we look at the bigger picture to ensure that there is a genuine business value to be derived from the migration. Why are you migrating to the cloud?
31%
average infrastructure cost savings vs on premises*
69%
reduction in unplanned downtime**
24 regions
and 76 availability zones globally
62%
more efficient IT infrastructure management vs on premises*
**Nucleus Research – Guidebook Understanding the Value of Migrating from On-premises to AWS for Application Security and Performance, June 2020
Q: What business challenges/opportunities are realised in a successful migration to Amazon?
This question is the first step in understanding the business value that will be delivered as part of the migration and from here we can understand the technical elements that would be in play as part of the migration.
Now we have a sound understanding of the customer business value, we are able to look at the technical elements and the costs associated with the migration process, always looking at the initial engagement on the business value that this migration would bring.
Like all good things – we start with a well thought out and consultative plan to ensure that the technical and business aspects of the migration are achieved.
We would then look at some of the tooling involved that would allow us and Amazon to discover the scope/scale of the migration using real data to explore all the various elements in play.
Let’s dive a little deeper into the planning and execution of the migration assessment.
As you can see from the diagram, we have started the process with “Assess”. At DoiT this is the most important part of the process. All our assumptions and recommendations flow from the requirements gathered in the assessment.
Another element of the requirements gathering is the 6Rs of migration:
• Retiring – Do we still need that FTP server in 2022? (Sometimes the answer is yes!)
• Retaining – We have assets to sweat here. Leave this for now.
• Rehosting – Lift and shift as is.
• Replatforming – We can virtualise it but leave it as is, we know nothing of the “Voodoo” that runs this system’s
• Refactoring & Re-architecting – We have learned our lessons, time to rebuild with a cloud centric view of the application stack.
The diagram below helps show these 6 R’s of migrations
In addition there is tooling (AWS Migration Evaluator and AWS Application Discovery Service) that we can use in coordination with Amazon to gather a lot of the detail for your current stack along with metrics (CPU/Disk/Utilisation/etc) to help with a deeper understanding of the landscape. This tooling allows the capture of you in situ estate either with an agent on the current hosts to gather detailed information on the instances or agentless survey that is less detailed, but may still be enough detail to start the planning.
Product | Description | Free Tier Offer Details | Product Pricing |
---|---|---|---|
AWS Migration Hub | A single location to track the progress of application migrations |
ALWAYS FREE Unlimited - Obtain unlimited right-sized EC2 instance recommendations. Unlimited - Track unlimited number of applications as they migrate. | AWS Migration Hub Pricing |
AWS Application Discovery Service | Collects server specification information, performance data and details of running processes and network connections |
ALWAYS FREE 1,000 Applications per account | AWS Application Discovery Service Pricing |
AWS Server Migration Service | Agentless service to migrate virtual-only workloads from on-premises infrastructure or from Microsoft Azure to AWS |
ALWAYS FREE Unlimited - Migrate an unlimited number of servers to AWS at no charge | AWS SMS Pricing |
AWS Service Catalog | Create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS |
ALWAYS FREE 1,000 API Calls per Month | AWS Service Catalog Pricing |
AWS Database Migration Service | AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. |
ALWAYS FREE 750 Hours of Amazon DMS Single-AZ dms.t2.micro instance usage 50 GB of included general purpose (SSD) storage | AWS DMS Pricing |
AWS Application Migration Service | Simplify and expedite migrations while reducing cost | 90 DAYS FREE | AWS Application Migration Service Pricing |
With the information gathered in the conversations and tooling we would be in a position to discuss the options available to you. As you can see from the Portfolio assessment diagram, the tooling will assist with some of the technical requirements to carry out the migrations.
To get started, you can choose to upload exports from third-party tools such as Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or install a collector agent to monitor. You will receive an assessment after data collection, which includes a projected cost estimate and savings of running your on-premises workloads in the AWS Cloud. This estimate will provide a summary of the projected costs to re-host on AWS based on usage patterns. It will show the breakdown of costs by infrastructure and software licences. With this information, you can make the business case and plan next steps. There is also information from the projected costs to look at other payment methods as opposed to “On Demand”. We would be able to look at savings that can be made using “Saving plans”, “Reserved instances” and DoiT’s very own Flexsave and Spot0.
Now that we have some real world data pertaining to your environments that are in play, we need to scope the work that will be migrated. Some of the elements discovered may not need to be migrated or they are going to be replaced with something new.
The first phase of a cloud migration focuses on the Assess phase and this will include a Cloud Readiness Assessment of your enterprise’s current state. These assessment tasks give you a clear picture of what you will migrate, as well as a business case for migration and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis for migration.
This assessment is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) and perspectives:
Mobilize
The goal of the mobilize phase is to build foundational capability both in the organisation and with the AWS environment. With our hands-on migration experience focused on security and operations automation we can ensure that you are addressing the elements that deliver both the technical and business requirements. This process brings together your portfolio of tools and practices in a scalable and secure AWS landing zone. In this phase, you migrate a small set of business applications to the cloud, while enforcing an agile and scalable delivery culture, team structure, and change management process. Executive buy in is critical to success due to the nature of cloud adoption (See CAF)
DoiT will continue to have a regular cadence during the Migration mobilize phase as this is an iterative process that evolves as your organisation develops new skills, tools, and capabilities and understands the challenges at a deeper level. These skills and capabilities build momentum and accelerate your migration efforts over time. Establishing the right foundation to build on is key to a successful migration. The AWS migration framework balances the business and technical efforts needed to complete a cloud migration. This model helps you identify key business drivers for migration and the best strategies for planning and implementing a successful cloud migration.
Migrate
We have the “coal face” experience when it comes to migrating and developing solutions that are both Cloud centric and designed with the Well Architected Framework at the top of mind.
Q: How much will all this cost?
Q: Where is the catch?
If you would like to discuss your migration or are thinking about migrating to AWS, contact us and we will be happy to start our discussions.
Jason
Artem