AWS Cloud Migration Services: Don’t Migrate Alone

Amazon Web Services has made huge investments in making it easier to move workloads to its public cloud. As part of this effort, Amazon offers a range of migration services, some offered by Amazon itself as managed or professional services, some by Amazon partners, and some based on technological tools.

In this post, we’ll cover the most important AWS migration services and how you can use them to ease your migration and offload work from in-house teams. In addition, we’ll show how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can ease migration of on-premise storage to AWS.

In this article, you will learn:

• Managing Large Migrations with AWS Migration Acceleration Program
• Using AWS Managed Services to Ease Migration
• Using AWS Professional Services to Outsource Migration Work
• Using AWS Migration Hub to Monitor and Track Migrations
• Automating Database Migration with AWS Database Migration Service
• Migrating VMware Data Centers with VMware Cloud on AWS

Managing Large Migrations with AWS Migration Acceleration Program

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is designed to help organizations perform large scale migrations faster and more effectively, by getting targeted assistance from Amazon and its migration partners.

The Migration Acceleration Program helps organizations build and execute their AWS migration strategy, in three stages:

1. Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) Phase—carried out as a 1-day workshop run by AWS or a MAP partner. Determines the current state of your readiness to migrate and defines areas where you have strong capabilities and where additional development is needed to migrate at scale. The MRA is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and assesses cloud readiness priorities and gaps along eight dimensions: landing zone, operating model, security and compliance, migration experience, center of excellence, migration plan, and business plan.
2. Migration Readiness & Planning (MRP) Stage—usually takes 2-4 weeks. AWS Professional Services and/or MAP partners help build the basis for a large-scale migration. This stage is based on a prescriptive methodology, building on best practices, gleaned from hundreds of migration experiences, aimed at reducing the cost and risk of a cloud migration. The MRP stage takes an agile approach, building a cloud learning center in the organization and working with it to develop a robust migration plan and a compelling business case for the migration, emphasizing total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI).
3. Migration Stage—usually takes 12-24 weeks. This stage involves implementing the migration strategy developed in the previous two stages, usually with the assistance of AWS Professional Services and/or a MAP Partner. It starts with the establishment of a "migration factory" that includes teams, cloud migration tools and processes to streamline the movement of workloads from on-premises data centers into AWS. The migration factory works through a prioritized backlog of workloads, according to migration patterns identified in planning. Best practices are applied where possible to move workloads faster, decrease risk and improve outcomes.
   
   

Using AWS Managed Services to Ease Migration

AWS Managed Services (AMS) provides an AWS Landing Zone, a secure, standards-compliant environment that lets organizations set up a multi-account cloud data center based on AWS best practices. In addition, it provides enterprise-scale work models, price optimization methodologies, and ongoing management of AWS infrastructure.

When performing large-scale migrations, AWS managed services can help: 

• Boost Safety and Compliance—provide a step-by-step process for moving security and identity systems to the cloud, including critical Active Directory services, without compromising organizational or industry standards. Includes mapping of compliance requirements (standards like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI) to operational requirements in the cloud.
• Accelerate Migration—AWS Managed Services offers an enterprise-ready, established working environment, helping you to migrate generation workloads in days versus months. Working together with colleagues and AWS Professional Services, AMS frees the minimal workable refactoring method of making just necessary alterations to your software to meet compliance and security requirements. AMS subsequently takes responsibility for managing your own cloud surroundings post-migration, like analyzing alarms and reacting to events, allowing your inner resources to concentrate on the strategic places on your company.
• Eliminate Innovation Barriers—gain agility and speed in your development efforts while preserving governance, safety, and compliance management. Achieve Enterprise DevOps practices by using AWS IaaS services to create a secure, compliant development platform that can move legacy workloads to the cloud, while promoting the development of new and refactored cloud native solutions.

Using AWS Professional Services to Outsource Migration Work

The AWS Professional Services organization is a global team of experts that works with your in-house team and a chosen member of the AWS Partner Network, to perform cloud computing projects. This can be an effective way to tackle challenging parts of your cloud migration project. 

AWS Professional Services provides services that can help achieve specific results related to cloud migration, taking specific migration projects off your hands. It also provides guidance for existing migration projects, helping you align them with proven best practices covering a variety of use cases, technological platforms and industry verticals.

AWS Professional Services not only joins your project as an additional, outsourced workforce, but also provides valuable knowledge in the form of webinars, white papers and blog posts, which can help you better understand, plan, and execute your cloud migration strategy.

Using AWS Migration Hub to Monitor and Track Migrations

AWS Migration Hub provides one location to monitor the migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. Migration Hub lets you pick the AWS and partner migration tools that match your needs, while providing visibility to the status of migrations across a portfolio of software.

Migration Hub also provides key metrics for individual applications, irrespective of the methods or technologies used to migrate them. Using Migration Hub, you can see the migration progress of all of the resources in your program, easily identify and fix problems, and decrease the total time and effort spent on your migration projects.

AWS Migration Hub provides a single place to track migrations in any AWS region. It is offered at no additional cost, beyond the charges for specific migration tools used in the project.

Source: Amazon Web Services

Automating Database Migration with AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases into AWS speedily and safely. The origin database stays fully operational throughout the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on it. The AWS Database Migration service can automatically migrate your data to and from many commonly used commercial and open source databases.

AWS Database Migration Service supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, or heterogeneous migrations involving different database systems, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server into Amazon Aurora, or migration between SQL and NoSQL databases. Additional options are continuously replicating data to AWS, and merging databases into a petabyte-scale information warehouse, leveraging Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3. 

AWS Database Migration Service is offered at very low cost—Amazon charges only for compute resources used during migration and additional log storage. Migrating a terabyte-size database typically costs around $3.

Migrating VMware Data Centers with VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS  provides VMware data centers with access to public cloud scale and efficiency, connecting VMware to 165+ AWS services including compute, storage, and machine learning. This can dramatically simplify migration projects involving VMware workloads. 

The VMware Cloud on AWS service offers:

• Low latency data transfer and replication to databases based on Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift, and low-cost S3 storage.
• Simple setup of Hybrid IT operations using VMware technologies like vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vCenter Server, enabling migration of workloads to the cloud while continuing to use the same VMware provisioning, storage, and lifecycle policies.
• Low cost migration, leveraging existing hardware and software already deployed in the on-premise VMware data center.
• High performance and robust security. Runs on next-generation Nitro EC2 bare metal infrastructure, within an isolated Amazon VPC.

AWS Migration with Cloud Volumes ONTAP

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload.

In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP assists with cloud migration. NetApp’s data replication tools SnapMirror® and Cloud Sync service will get your data to the cloud.