5 Phases of AWS Cloud Migration

by Melih Yurduseven

Jul 28, 2022

10 min read

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AWS provides a vast range of services, including compute power, storage space, machine learning, IoT, gaming, serverless, and etc. AWS ensures the best solutions for everyone, especially for startups who don't have the capital to invest in their own IT infrastructure or for companies who want to try out new technologies without making large upfront investments.

If you are still confused about staying on-prem against going on cloud, you better check our previous blog to understand cloud benefits and what you can achieve.

In this article I will explain how to design a five phase AWS migration process that includes planning, designing, migration, going live and on-going support. Grab your coffee and join me! ☕️

If you're thinking of moving to the cloud, it is crucial to develop a core strategy on day one. Let’s dive in! 🤿

Planning

Planning is the initial phase of the cloud adoption process for all organizations considering moving their workloads to a cloud environment. It's important to keep in mind that you're building both an infrastructure and a business model for scale, reliability, and agility when you’re designing your cloud environment. At this level, you must first analyze your structure and develop a strategy and KPIs for implementing a successful cloud migration.

Underperforming key points in legacy infrastructure should be clear once you have selected your most important KPIs and created a strategy. You should ensure that your significant key points are identified and addressed in the future. With all that said, now you can address your goals towards the future. 🚀

Design

Now that you've assessed your legacy infrastructure's present specs, challenges, and requirements for a successful cloud infrastructure in the future, it's time to create a tailored cloud solution for your business. Designing a cloud architecture is different from designing a legacy architecture. It can be a daunting task, but there are some key things to keep in mind that can make the process much easier.

Define and Record the Architecture

It's important to define the detailed infrastructure architecture, the combination of services, storages, databases, application solutions, and all other significant components you'll put in place once the critical decisions have been made. You can use it as a migration roadmap for the whole process. It will work in a similar way to this migration checklist that will outline all of the important components of your cloud infrastructure, as well as where your applications and data will settle, so you can easily track progress.

Selecting a Migration Strategy

After finalizing the planning phase, you may start thinking about how to move an application. This is the time to make a decision about what's in your environment, how everything is interconnected, what will be simple to migrate and what will be challenging, as well as how you'll migrate your application.

Depending on the architecture and current licensing agreements, the complexity of converting existing applications varies. There are 6 common migration strategies on AWS to make it easier.

Retire
Following the define and record process of your architecture, you may decide that you no longer require some of your applications and will simply retire them. Since you won't be using them any more, this is just getting rid of them. This can also boost your savings.
Retain
If you're not ready to migrate the application or you may be required to do so for compliance reasons you may prefer to keep it on-premises. If legacy operating systems and applications are not supported by cloud environments (not so common situation) you may also prefer to keep it as it is.
Rehost
Rehosting, often known as "Lift and Shift," is one of the simplest ways to migrate to the AWS Cloud. This refers to moving your systems or applications onto the AWS Cloud environment exactly as they are. This strategy is great for the organizations that need to migrate really quickly.
This kind of approach is also the first step for the majority of applications because it's simpler to optimize or re-architect them after they've already been running in the AWS Cloud.
Replatform
Replatform, known as “Lift and Reshape”, involves moving applications almost as-is, but replacing some components to take advantage of the AWS cloud.
Replatforming requires some expertise and knowledge because it includes application optimizations during the migration step. For example, you might decide to migrate from your own relational database system to the Amazon RDS using the same underlying technology but a different business model with built-in cloud resilience.
Rearchitect
This approach, also known as refactor, means a comprehensive redesign of an application to make it cloud-ready. Refactoring typically involves separating the application into services and transitioning to a microservices design. Even if the refactoring requires huge effort, most of the applications end up with it.
Repurchase
Decommissioning the application and substituting a cloud-based version are the key steps of this method. It is now possible to use the same program as a cloud service rather than an on-premise license due to a licensing change.

Migration

Now that you've completed all of your planning and designing, it's time to put your plans into action and move on to the cloud. The entire migration procedure can be categorized into three stages.

Migrate Your Infrastructure

Starting by backing up your current servers and the data and apps they contain; ensuring that your current environment is easily retrievable and safe from loss is critical to avoiding catastrophic downtimes if a system or process fails will be a perfect start. Then start putting together the framework for your new cloud infrastructure.

Set operating systems, and networking required to make your infrastructure functioning.
Provision your infrastructure and make it accessible.
Test the infrastructure and all components/services.

Migrate Your Data

If you’ve properly backed up your existing data, you can start your data migration. You can begin by extracting your data from your legacy infrastructure.
Here, we have a shining star that will help you!

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a AWS service that migrates relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other data storage to the cloud.

You must perform capacity analysis, purchase hardware and software, install and administrate systems, and test and troubleshoot the installation in a traditional solution. Gladly, all hardware and software required for your migration are deployed, managed, and monitored automatically by AWS DMS. Within minutes of initiating the AWS DMS configuration procedure, your migration might be up and running.

You can scale your resources as needed using AWS DMS to meet your actual workload. If you need more storage, for example, you may quickly increase your allocated storage and restart your migration, which takes only a few minutes.

It is good to remember that AWS DMS works on a pay-as-you-go basis. Unlike traditional licensing models with up-front purchase costs and ongoing maintenance fees, you simply pay for AWS DMS resources as you use them and after you complete the migration you can decommission resources so you won’t pay a penny more.

AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT) AWS SCT provides a project-based user interface to automatically convert the database schema of your source database into a format compatible with your target Amazon RDS instance. Your converted schema works with MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL DB, an Amazon Aurora DB cluster, or an Amazon Redshift cluster. It also works with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). The transformed schema may either be kept as data in an Amazon S3 bucket or used with a database on an Amazon EC2 instance.

AWS SCT includes extra features that assist you in moving your data to the AWS Cloud in addition to converting your existing database schema from one database engine to another.
Some of them are;

You can use AWS SCT to create AWS DMS endpoints/tasks and you can run and monitor these tasks from AWS SCT.
You can use AWS SCT to migrate extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes.
To get ready to move your data to Amazon Redshift, you can extract data from your data warehouse using data extraction agents. You can utilize AWS SCT to manage the data extraction agents.
You can enhance your current Amazon Redshift database with AWS SCT. AWS SCT advises using sort keys and distribution keys to optimize your database.
You can use AWS SCT to convert SQL in your C++, C#, Java, or other application code. You can view, analyze, edit the converted SQL code.

Migrate Your Applications

Allright! Time to migrate your application to the AWS Cloud! AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is the perfect fit for this job. AWS MGN is a highly automated lift-and-shift (rehost) service that makes migrating applications to AWS easier, faster, and less expensive with minimal downtime.
It allows you to “lift” and “shift” physical, virtual, or cloud servers without having to worry about compatibility concerns or performance issues. When you're ready, it converts and launches your servers on AWS for you, allowing you to swiftly reap the benefits of AWS cost savings, efficiency, security, and agility.

Again, it’s good to be reminded if your preferred destination is an AWS GovCloud or China Region, consider using CloudEndure Migration.

Going Live

After all the analysis, planning, preparation, and testing processes you can finally go live! It's good to note that preparing is essential at each and every step, including “Going Live”.

It is essential to have a rollback strategy in place in the unlikely event that unexpected problems arise or the go-live takes significantly longer than intended. Stop making modifications to your legacy environment, and then do a last data sync before your go-live event.

Perform a demo go-live event to assess the time required to synchronize your data and identify any significant delays and ensure your downtime is minimal. Once you ensure the downtime is minimal, consider routing all your traffic to your new AWS environment.

Continuous Support

Once going live, maintaining a healthy cloud environment will ultimately determine how successful you remain. To adopt the changes, you will need to assess updates and security patches on a regular basis and deliver application and software updates. Also, performance monitoring and application-level tests are essential to guarantee that your cloud environment and its related business tools deliver the greatest user experience to your users.

As an AWS Advanced Services partner and AWS Rising Star, Sufle is ready to take your business to the next level by accelerating your cloud migration process.