The AWS migration service is not a travel or ticketing service for humans travelling or moving to reside a different country. It is all about migrating workloads and servers to the cloud which provides many benefits, such as increased scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility. The process of migrating to the cloud, also known as “cloud migration,” typically involves moving existing workloads, applications, and data from on-premises servers or other cloud platforms to a cloud environment like AWS. And sometimes the migration happens from another cloud provider to AWS, this is still referred to as cloud migration.
There are several approaches to migrating to the cloud, including:
- Lift and shift: This approach involves moving existing workloads and servers to the cloud without making any changes to the architecture or code. It’s also known as “rehosting”
- Refactoring: This approach involves making changes to the architecture or code of an application to take advantage of cloud-native features and services.
- Re-platforming: This approach involves migrating an application to a different platform, such as moving a Windows-based application to a Linux-based platform.
- Re-architecting: This approach involves redesigning the application architecture to take full advantage of cloud-native services and best practices.
AWS provides several tools and services to help with the migration process, such as AWS Migration Hub, AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS Server Migration Service, and AWS Database Migration Service. These services can help to automate the migration process and make it easier to move your workloads and servers to the cloud.
It’s important to note that migrating to the cloud can be a complex process, and it’s important to thoroughly plan and test the migration before making the final move to the cloud. It’s also important to evaluate the costs and benefits of migration, and to consider the security, compliance, and data privacy requirements of your organization.
Whether you are transitioning to the cloud for the first time or migrating from an on-premises system, it is essential to have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place. This plan should focus on mitigating the impact of potential issues during the migration process. The cloud infrastructure offers high resiliency and high availability, allowing you to build your disaster recovery plan in the same region and Availability Zone or, if there are no legal or compliance restrictions, even in a different region.
The advantage of the cloud is that it gives you the flexibility to build a disaster recovery plan without investing large amounts of money on physical solutions in other cities or regions. The plan should include a reliable backup solution that allows you to easily restore data, a plan for quickly recovering systems and services, and a strategy for restoring applications and data in the event of a disaster. It is also important to regularly test your plan to ensure it is up to date and effective. With an effective disaster recovery plan in place, you can be confident that your business will remain resilient and productive in the face of unexpected events.
We, at DigitalCloudAdvisor understand completely that there is no one migration that can be implemented and used with all business, this is a tailor fit solution that gets made and built to fit the structure of every company individually. Utilising the tools that AWS provide they make this transition easier, and as organised as possible to minimise the disruption to business uptime, and smooth running of the operations.
As a typical company infrastructure or set up on premises, company would have a typical one or more server racks to handle its shared data, their data base and networking needs, it will have the any applications running on the server on VM or a dedicated rack, also it will have security devices and firewalls running all in one place. As shown in the diagram below:
To Achieve high availability on the frontend application it is installed on 2 servers, but if the database or the Active Directory is off line, the setup fail, and to avoid this in on premises you need to invest in more hardware to run everything in parallel, so in case one side fail it does not affect your business.
At same time you need to buy big enough servers to handle your peak performance, but most of the time you don’t hit peak, so this extra capacity sits idle most of the time. Most on premises servers are underutilised by over 75% or more according to all tech researches. So, they only use 20-30% of the capacity to run the day-to-day jobs.
The move to the cloud presents a myriad of advantages from a financial perspective. By creating a setup tailored to the specific needs of the business and its workloads, organisations can benefit from the scalability and elasticity of the cloud. Through right-sizing the servers, businesses can ensure that they are only paying for the compute they use, rather than resources that are left idle.
The diagram provided showcases a typical cloud architecture setup. This setup can be tailored to fit any business’s individual needs, leveraging the power of the cloud to provide the desired level of performance and cost-efficiency. By using automation and orchestration tools, companies can further increase efficiency and optimise their cloud usage, reducing costs and optimising performance.
The move to the cloud is becoming increasingly popular among businesses due to the many advantages it can provide. Through cost-efficiency and scalability, companies can benefit from the cloud and achieve their desired results without having to invest large amounts of resources.
Showing this Diagram does not mean that you have to move your IT infrastructure to the cloud, it is all depending on the business type, deployment model & compliance.
Some business will just choose to move their backup solution to the cloud, to save on the high cost of backup tapes as well as not to invest to expand or grow their physical inhouse servers. Some others would run in parallel and distribute the load between the on premises and the cloud, again to speed up the growing of their IT capacity without having to invest massively in duplicating the IT servers. Other customers would need to increase their reach globally while reducing their latency for their global customers again without investing upfront massively to reach global audience.
Hybrid deployment is an effective way of transitioning to the cloud without having to completely move away from on-premises servers. It allows businesses to leverage cloud resources to increase their development efficiency while still having the option to use their own local hardware. By using cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, businesses can deploy resources quickly and easily without having to worry about the associated costs. It is an excellent way to test out new products, ideas, applications, or business models without the need to invest in new hardware or wait for a lengthy acquisition process. Furthermore, businesses can turn off the resources they no longer need, ensuring they do not have to pay for services that are no longer being used. Following the concept of that they call fail fast, which means if an application does not work, simply switch the resources off.
This diagram shows how Hybrid infrastructure might look like, and it has so many uses and it can scale in many ways depending on the clients’ needs. Here client is serving different applications in the cloud than what is being served from on premises. Still can be serving the same applications from both sites for even more audience, can launch in a different region completely again to get closer to the end user, this is all through the benefits of the global infrastructure provided by AWS. No need to build your own servers in every location you need to approach.
At DigitalCloudAdvisors, we study each case or business scenario individually and tailor build the solution to suit business needs to the best standards, yet it is still up to the customer to choose the architectural pattern they feel suit their needs and budgets.
The move to the cloud helps companies focus on what is important to them which is the business model they offer to increase their efficiency and in turn increase their profits. This happens by freeing the time for the IT personnel to work on developing new feature to or new products they can offer their clients. IT department will not spend any of their time to trouble shoot hardware, replacing storage arrays, updating and patching the servers all these jobs’ AWS takes care of them as they look after their own infrastructure.
To summarise in few words, migrating to the cloud comes in many forms and types, you can totally commit and migrate completely to the cloud, or have best of both worlds and work hybrid between on premises and the cloud, no one solution fits all business models or clients. And we here at DigitalCloudAdvisors can help you work out the best solution that fits your business needs and help you achieve that.
Speak to one of our advisors to see how we can help you move to the cloud.
