Migration - on-premises to cloud

 

Migration is the process of moving data, applications, or other business components from an organization’s on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, or moving them from one cloud service to another. 

Following are the 5 AWS Migration steps:

1.    Planning and Assessment

2.    Migration Tools

3.    AWS Cloud Storage Options

4.    Migration Strategies

5.    Application Migration Options

1. Planning and Assessment

The planning and assessment phase is divided into:

·       Financial Assessment

·       Security & Compliance Assessment

·       Technical and Functional assessment

 

1.1 Financial Assessment

Before deciding on-prem to cloud migration, you need to estimate the cost of moving data to the AWS cloud. A careful and detailed analysis is required to weigh the financial considerations of on-premises center versus employing a cloud-based infrastructure.

P.S. You also need to evaluate the on-premises costs which include server cost, storage cost, network cost, and IT labor costs.

1.2 Security and Compliance Assessment

If you are wondering about:

·       Overall risk tolerance

·       Main concerns around availability, durability, and confidentiality of your data.

·       Security threats

·       Options available to retrieve all data back from the cloud

 

Then it is better to involve your security advisers and auditors early in this process. Since data security is a challenging task, therefore, you must understand your threats, risks, and based on that classify the data into different categories. This will help you know which datasets to move to the cloud and which ones to keep in-house.

1.3 Technical and Functional Assessment

 

Assessing the need to understand which applications are more suited to the cloud strategically and architecturally. This helps you decide:

·       Which application/data to move into the cloud first?

·       Which data to transfer later?

·       Which applications should remain in-house?

 

Questions you should ask yourself before moving data into the cloud:

·       Which apps should the business move to the cloud first?

·       Can we reuse our existing resource management and configuration tools?

·       How can we get rid of support contracts for hardware, software, and network?

·       Does the cloud provide all of the infrastructure building blocks we require?

 

2. AWS Migration Tools

There are physical limitations when it comes to migrating data from on-premises locations into the cloud. That’s where migration tools come to rescue. The following tools will help you move data through roads, networks, and technology partners.

2.1 Unmanaged Cloud Data Migration Tools

 

If you need easy, one-and-done methods to transfer data at small scales, go for the following tools:

·       Glacier command line interface- On-premises data → Glacier vaults

·       S3 command line interface- Write commands → Data moves directly into S3 buckets

·       Rsync- Open source tool combined with 3rd party file system tools. Copy data directly → S3 buckets

 

2.2 Amazon Managed Cloud Data Migration tools

Based on optimizing or replacing the internet and friendly interfaces to S3, there are the following tools you can leverage:

A. Optimizing or Replacing the Internet

Ideal for moving data lakes, extensive archives and more.

	Ideal for	Data Migration Tool to Be Used
1.	Migrate petabytes of data in batches to the cloud	AWS Import/Export Snowball
2.	Migrate exabytes of data in batches to the cloud	AWS Snowmobile
3.	Connect directly into an AWS regional data center	AWS Direct Connect
4.	Migrate recurring jobs (with incremental changes over long distances)	Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

 

B. Friendly Interfaces to S3

Makes it simple to use S3 with existing native applications. Helps you to integrate existing process flows like recovery, backup, etc.

 

	Ideal for	Data Migration Tool to Be Used
1.	Push backups or archives to the cloud with least disruption	Technology Partnerships
2.	Cache data locally in a hybrid model	Gateways (AWS or Partner)
3.	Collect and ingest multiple streaming data sources	Amazon Kinesis Firehose
4.	Migrate petabytes of data in batches + apply onboard storage + compute capabilities	AWS Snowball Edge

3. Various Storage Options Available in the AWS Cloud

Decide which storage option is feasible for you based on:

·       Cost,

·       Durability,

·       Latency performance (response time),

·       Availability,

·       Size of the object stored (large, small),

·       Accessibility,

·       Cache-ability,

·       Consistency (eventual, strict),

·       Relational (SQL joins)

·       Update Frequency

 

Which Storage Option to Use?

4. 2 Major Strategies for AWS Migration

Here are two strategies that will help you move part of or an entire system to the cloud without disrupting the current business:

1. Forklift Migration Strategy

Self-contained applications, tightly coupled applications, or stateless applications might be better served by this approach. “Pick it all up at once and move it to the cloud” approach.

Pros

·       Shrinking IT infrastructure footprint: Using this approach for specific application types, you have to worry less about the IT infrastructure.

·       Focus on Other Important Resources: With this approach, you will be able to focus on your core and differentiating resources to be ahead of the competition.

 

Cons

Might not be able to take immediate advantage of scalability and elasticity of the cloud.

 

2. Hybrid Migration Strategy

Considering some parts of an application and moving them to the cloud while leaving other parts of the application in place. Ideal for large systems involving several applications.

Pros

 

·       Low-risk approach to the migration of applications to the cloud.

·       Parts can be moved and optimized one at a time.

·       Reduced risk of unexpected behavior after migration.

 

Cons

 

·       Time-consuming.

 

Configuring and Creating AMI

 

·       AMI provides the information needed to launch an instance. This is provided by AWS or solution provider.

·       You will need to create an AMI for each component designed to run in a separate Amazon EC2 instance.

·       Create an automated or semi-automated deployment process to reduce efforts and time.

·       Think of a process for configuration management to ensure your servers running in the cloud are included in your process.

 

 

5. Application Migration Options

 

Below are some appropriate application migration options available:

1. Live Migration

The process of moving a running application from physical machines to cloud without disconnecting the application. Memory, network connectivity, and storage of the virtual machine are replicated from the physical device to cloud.

2. Host Cloning

It is cloning the Operating System image and typically one-time migration.

3. Data Migration

Synchronizing the data between computer storage types or file formats to the cloud. The data is selectively pushed to AWS Cloud.

4. App Containerization

An OS-level virtualization method for deploying and running distributed applications.

5. VM Conversion

Converts Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) into AWS recognizable format. The data is transferred via API.

The level of Efforts Required with Each Migration Method: