In this article, we will be discussing the three phases of AWS Cloud Migration.
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is when an organization moves its workloads, including applications, websites, storage, databases, servers (physical or virtual), or data centers, to a cloud-based infrastructure provided by a cloud service provider.
Migration can help either shift from an on-premises environment to a cloud platform or from one cloud platform to another.
Migrating to a cloud platform thereby :
- Enhances scalability
- Improves efficiency
- Speeds up application/service deployment
- Reduces infrastructure complexity.
What is AWS Cloud Migration?
AWS Cloud Migration refers to moving your organization’s on-premises environment or any variant cloud service to AWS.
According to the Canalys report as of April 2021, the Cloud market grew by 35% with AWS maintaining the lead by capturing 32% of the market with Azure and Google Cloud.
The Coca-Cola Company, Samsung, Twenty-First Century Fox, Enel, BP are a few Enterprises among the whole lot, to successfully transfer their on-premises workloads to AWS.
The 3 Phase 
The migration of your workloads to AWS follows a typical 3 phase iterative approach.
Assessment Phase:
The main areas of focus for the assessment phase are:
Current readiness for operating in the cloud:
Since your organization has decided to shift to the cloud, it is crucial to assess its readiness for operating in the cloud. Answering questions such as
- Is my organization ready for the shift?
- What will be the future outcomes on performance/costs?
- Is it necessary to shift the entire data center or to adopt a hybrid approach?
will align you to a decision about whether you should make a shift.
AWS offers CART (Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool), a 16-question online assessment and survey to check your readiness across the six perspectives of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, namely – business, people, process, platform, operations, and security.
Developing the business plan for Migration and identifying desired outcomes:
An ideal Business Plan should calculate the cost of Migration on the cloud and the cost after the Migration and compare the current on-premises environment.
Building a precise business plan will help your organization understand points like:
- Why is there a need to make a shift from existing on-premises to cloud?
- How much will the Migration cost?
- How will AWS help in achieving the goals/vision your organization has already aligned?
The business case for Migration is categorized as
- Run cost analysis:
- comparing the current operating model with post-migration
- discounts, pricing, and purchasing impacts
- Cost of change:
- migration planning
- changes in the management
- migration cost estimation
- Labor productivity:
- calculating the significant reduction in the no. of hours spent
- gains from automation
- business value
- faster, flexible, and secure deployment
- business expansion
- cost avoidance (e.g.server refresh )
So your business plan should cover everything from Why you want to migrate to AWS to discussing the costs and overheads for Migration and how it benefits your organization apart from just cost-saving.
Mobilization Phase:
The main areas of focus are :
- Refining business case: The gaps that were detected in the assessment phase for your organization’s readiness in the cloud are evaluated and are refined by
- building baseline environment
- evaluating operational readiness by focusing on
- The business (vision, productivity, goals alignment)
- IT Organization (req of cloud skills, adapting to changes)
- Creating a migration plan: You, along with your AWS partner, will be making a migration plan that will help in understanding what needs to be migrated, when and how it should be migrated. Your mitigation plan should account for all the interdependencies between your applications and should develop strategies for mitigation to meet your aligned goals.
Based on the architecture of your existing applications, AWS has designed six migration strategies to help your organization choose the one owning to your needs :
- Rehost (Lift and Shift)
- The application is ready and needs to be hosted on AWS.
- Replatform
- modify your application and rehost it
- Repurchase (drop and shop)
- upgrade the application and adopt the new architecture
- Refactor
- adding features, scaling limits
- Retire
- eliminating the no longer valuable resources and coming with a new strategy
- Retain
- retaining applications which don’t need to move to the cloud
In this phase, all the obstacles will be approached with a solution to overcome them.
Migration And Modernization :
Along with your AWS partner, you implement the migration plan for your organization and explore the benefits of the cloud. You traverse the path of modernization by shutting old systems and adopting cloud technologies to increase operational readiness, optimize costs, lower significant deployment time, and scale your systems up or down with your need of the hour.
AWS Marketplace enables you to convert to subscription-based, elastic metering and billing (Pay as you go model )by not unnecessarily purchasing an in-perpetuity license. Alongside, you can buy, deploy, manage over 7000 third-party software services.
Conclusion
AWS migration refers to moving your organization’s on-premises environment or any variant cloud service to AWS, which happens in 3 phases.
- Assess
- Evaluating your business objectives for AWS migration
- Developing the business case that suits your organization
- Mobilize
- Refining your business case
- Creating and preparing the Migration plan (calculating costs, ROI)
- Migrate and Modernize
- Working with your AWS partner to migrate your applications
- Adopting native cloud techniques
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