AWS Fundamentals: Migrating to the Cloud

Automation – AWS API Centrality :

AWS is API centric. What I mean by this is that a large majority of AWS services and tools have directly accessible APIs that you can use for creating, configuring, and managing the services you employ. The reason I bring this up is because especially when you’re trying to handle the very difficult and sensitive task of migrating data in applications across environments, handling everything manually is going to cause a lot of headache, a lot of trouble shooting, and timing is gonna be very difficult to predict and test on a large scale. If, on the other hand, you’re able to automate many of the tasks, the scale of what you can do grows exponentially.

To access the APIs within AWS, there are a couple of options.

1. You can use the various SDKs that provide access to the interfaces
2. You can use the AWS Command Line Interface, or CLI.

The power of these are that they allow you to create scripts and applications to handle a lot of the work not only during migration, but also when managing, optimizing, and configuring your environment post migration.

If you’re not already familiar, I highly suggest you start with the AWS CLI. This is a toolset that is easy to install locally and gives you the ability to do anything you would be able to do in the management console and more. Try out different tasks, test your various scripts, and see how it can help you.

AWS System Manager & AWS Cloud Formation :

1.ClouldFormation :

CloudFormation gives you the ability to have one or more templates that can be used to create, configure, and update your infrastructure through the CloudFormation engine.

This becomes very helpful in migrating because it gives you the ability to quickly spin up test environments that will look exactly like your production environment. You can test configurations, spin up the full environment with a few clicks or a single command, and then tear it down once you’ve gotten the data you’re looking for.

The biggest learning curve with CloudFormation comes in creating templates. But luckily for you there’s a lot of documentation and reference material on this, as well as various tools that can help you put a template together from either sample templates or from scratch.

2.AWS Systems Manager :

You are managing your systems. Systems Manager gives you a path into the servers you are running that enables you to run commands, schedule updates, and manage various other tasks from a single point.

When managing a fleet of servers, the ability to run a command on the entire fleet without having to directly connect to any of the servers individually saves time and effort. Another major benefit of this is that it allows you to manage systems not just in AWS, but also with your on premises servers. It has this ability because it uses an agent, the systems manager agent, or SSM agent, that can be installed on both Amazon EC2 instances, as well as your servers running locally.

TSO logic :

TSO Logic is a solution that exists within AWS to provide insight into what you currently have, and give you options into what you may want to utilize, in AWS.

This can be done as a pre-migration step, or as an ongoing analysis to ensure that you are always running each application in the best place, with the right software, even as your environment and prices change.

TSO Logic provides discovery of your existing resources to help identify what you are running in your compute, storage, data base, and other areas. To help evaluate what your total cost of ownership, or TCO, is for various applications.

We then are able to use predictive analytics to help determine the best fit for your workloads in the cloud. Using data-driven methodology, and continuous visibility will help to provide on-going insights, and predictive analytics for all of your workloads.

Cloud Endure :

CloudEndure migration simplifies, expedites, and automates large-scale migrations from physical, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructure to AWS. It automatically converts any application running on supported operating systems, enabling full functionality on AWS without compatibility issues.

Continuous data replication takes place in the background without application disruption or performance impact which ensures that data is synced in real-time and minimizes cutover windows. When migration cutover is initiated, CloudEndure executes a highly-automated machine conversion and orchestration process, allowing even the most complex applications and databases to run natively in AWS.

The continuous data protection engine works in memory, neither taking snapshots nor writing any data to disk, which means near-zero impact on performance. Furthermore, CloudEndure is designed for large-scale migrations and enables the replication of data from thousands of machines simultaneously without performance impact.

You can also manage the entire migration life cycle and verify your readiness for cutover directly from the CloudEndure console. Lastly, CloudEndure gives you the control to test your target machines as often as you like in preparation for cutover by just clicking a button.

It also provides you with the ability to quickly and easily shift your environment to AWS from existing physical or virtual data centers, private clouds, or other public clouds. As you can see, while you can work on migrating your environments yourself, using the tools and creating your own applications and automation scripts to handle your environment transfer, tools like CloudEndure can help to make the whole ordeal much easier.

Elastic Beanstalk :

With Elastic Beanstalk, you can quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud without having to learn about the infrastructure that runs those applications. Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. This can be a useful tool for you to utilize when testing functionality of your applications in AWS. Checkout these Elastic Beanstalk tutorials and concepts for more info.

AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) :

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program, MAP, is designed to help enterprises that are committed to a migration journey. MAP was created to provide consulting, support, training, and service credits. The goal is to reduce any associated risks with migrating to the cloud, to build a strong foundation for the operation, and to help offset the initial costs.

The program includes guidance and methodologies for migrating legacy systems as well as a suite of automation tools to help speed up more common migration scenarios. AWS also maintains a partner Competency Program, which allows companies in our partner network to demonstrate and prove their expertise in areas like migrations.

Migration Delivery Partners :

Migration Delivery Partners help customers through every stage of migration, accelerating results by providing personnel, tools, and education in the form of professional services. These partners either are, or have a relationship with, an AWS audited Managed Service Provider to help you with ongoing support of AWS workloads.

Previous Part in the series was regarding Security in AWS, https://programmerprodigy.code.blog/2020/06/03/aws-fundamentals-addressing-security-risk/

Next Part in the series is based on building sever less applications, https://programmerprodigy.code.blog/2020/06/10/aws-fundamentals-building-server-less-applications/