More about Cloud Migration
- What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Process and Tools
- Petabyte-Scale Storage Success Stories With Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- Azure StorSimple EOL: Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Hybrid Cloud Management
- Refactoring Applications to Kubernetes in Cloud Migrations
- The War Over the Cloud Has Ended (and the Winner Might Surprise You)
- Modern Data Estate: What IT Leaders Need To Know
- Strategies for AWS Migration: The New 7th R Explained
- Cloud Computing Deployment Models and Architectures
- Cloud Adoption Strategy: What’s the Best Approach for Your Organization?
- Hybrid Cloud Strategy: A Winning Model for Enterprises
- Google Cloud Architecture and Building Your Own Solution Architecture
- SnapMirror in the Cloud: New Use Cases for NetApp’s Data Replication Technology
- 8 Digital Transformation Technologies and Their Business Impact
- What Is Digital Transformation in Banking?
- Digital Transformation in Healthcare: 4 Key Trends
- Digital Transformation: Examples from 5 Industries
- The Future of Cloud Computing: 5 Trends You Must Know About
- 5 Types of Digital Transformation and the Technologies that Power Them
- Digital Transformation Strategy: 6 Tips for Success
- Kubernetes Data Mobility with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- Application Migration to Azure: 4 Approaches and One Migration Tool
- Cloud First Strategy: Challenges, Considerations, and Best Practices
- Application Migration to AWS: Free Tools to Ease Your Migration
- Why Cloud Adoption Fails and 6 Tips for Success
- Cloud Application Migration: A Practical Guide
- AWS Snowball vs Snowmobile: Data -Migration Options Compared
- AWS Snowball Edge: Data Shipping and Compute at the Edge
- AWS Snowmobile: Migrate Data to the Cloud With the World’s Biggest Hard Disk
- AWS Snowball Family: Options, Process, and Best Practices
- AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF): 6 Migration Perspectives
- Top 3 Cloud Adoption Frameworks: Your Path To The Cloud
- AWS Snowball Pricing Simplified
- Azure Cloud Adoption Framework: The 9 Methodologies Explained
- Cloud Roadmap: Mapping Out Your Path To The Cloud
- Hybrid Deployment on Google Cloud: Meet Google Anthos
- 3 Ways to Create an Azure Migrate Project
- Azure Migration Step by Step: Discover, Migrate, Optimize, and Monitor
- Migrate from VMware to Azure: The Basics and a Quick Tutorial
- Migrate SQL Server to Azure: Options, Tools, and a Quick Tutorial
- Migrate Databases to Azure: 3 Quick Tutorials
- 4 Ways to Migrate SQL to Azure
- Azure Migration Program: 4 Key Elements
- Azure Migrate: Key Components and a 4-Step Migration Plan
- Cloud Journey: 6 Stages of Cloud Adoption
- 5 Azure Data Migration Tools You Should Be Using
- Azure Migration Tools: One-Click Migration for VMs and Data
- Typical Mistakes and Misconceptions Business Leaders Have About Hybrid and Multicloud
- Google Cloud PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed?
- AWS Storage Gateway: Connecting Your On-Premise Storage to the Amazon Cloud
- Azure PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed?
- Cloud Scalability: How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Stores Petabytes of Data
- AWS Migration: Understanding the Process and Solving 5 Key Challenges
- Google Cloud Pricing vs AWS: A Fair Comparison?
- VMware Cloud Services: A New Option for Hybrid Cloud Management
- AWS PostgreSQL: Managed or Self-Managed?
- Google Cloud MySQL: MySQL as a Service vs. Self Managed in the Cloud
- Azure MySQL: MySQL as a Service vs. Self-Managed in the Cloud
- AWS MySQL: MySQL as a Service vs. Self Managed in the Cloud
- Cloud Adoption for Financial Companies
- VMware on AWS: Architecture and Service Options
- VMware on Google Cloud: A Deployment Roadmap
- VMware on Azure: One-Step Migration to the Cloud
- Better in the Cloud: Workloads Gartner Says You Should Move to the Cloud Now
- 3 Cloud Migration Approaches and Their Pros and Cons
- Oracle on Google Cloud: Two Deployment Options
- How to Upload Files to Azure Blob Storage with AzCopy, PowerShell, and More
- Oracle on Azure: Fully Managed vs Self Managed
- Azure SQL Server: Managed Service vs Self Managed
- Google Partners with NetApp on New Bare Metal Solution in the Cloud
- AWS Database Migration Service: Copy-Paste Your Database to Amazon
- SQL Server on Google Cloud: Two Deployment Options
- GCP Migration with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- SQL Server in AWS: Two Deployment Options
- Azure Database Migration Service: Automate Your Cloud DB Migration
- Azure Managed Service Provider: How to Save Time and Reduce Cloud Overhead
- Hybrid Cloud Storage: The Best of Both Worlds
- Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions for AWS Compared: Storage Gateway vs Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- AWS Oracle: Two Options for Migrating Your Oracle DB to Amazon
- Migrating Physical Server to AWS: Now Free with AWS CloudEndure
- Azure Hybrid Cloud:
Azure in Your Local Data Center - What Is a Lift and Shift Cloud Migration?
- Google Cloud Migration Tools: Copying 1GB or 500TB? Learn How
- VMC on AWS Vs. Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- AWS Cloud Migration Services: Don’t Migrate Alone
- 5 Steps to the Cloud: AWS Migration Checklist
- Setting up Storage Gateway with Amazon EC2
- VMware Cloud on AWS: How Fujitsu Saves Millions Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- SQL Server End of Life Challenges and How Cloud Volumes ONTAP Can Help
- The Cloud Tiering Service Architecture: How We Get Cold Data from Your Data Center to the Cloud
- Cloud Data Integration 101: Benefits, Challenges, and Tools
- Google Cloud Migration: Why and How to Make the Move
- What’s the Easiest Way to Start Using the Cloud? Three Cloud Onboarding Approaches
- AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: Choosing the Best Cloud Provider for You
- Cloud Migration Tools: Transferring Your Data with Ease
- Azure Migration Strategy: Four Steps to the Cloud
- 11-Step Azure Migration Checklist
- AWS Migration Strategy: The 6 Rs in Depth
- Officeworks Adopts a Cloud-First Strategy with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
- Azure Migration: The Keys to a Successful Enterprise Migration to Azure
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP: Cloud Migration Case Studies
Subscribe to our blog
Thanks for subscribing to the blog.
July 25, 2019
Topics: Cloud Volumes ONTAP Data MigrationAWSElementary8 minute read
Amazon describes a "6 Rs" model adapted from Gartner's "5 Rs" model, which outlines ways to perform AWS migration. The 6 Rs model includes: Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retire and Retain.
In this article, we’ll discuss each of these in depth, and show you how to decide which R to select for your applications. We’ll also show how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help you migrate large volumes of data to the cloud effortlessly.
In this page you will learn:
- Why move an application to the cloud
- The concept of cloud migration strategy
- The 6 Rs: AWS migration Strategies in Depth
- Lift and shift for data with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Why Move an Application to the Cloud?
There are three typical drivers for undertaking the effort of migrating an application to the cloud, which can also affect your choice of a migration strategy.
- User agility and control—most application teams today depend heavily on IT teams to get them the machines they need to test, develop and integrate workloads. It may take IT teams days to make machines available or even weeks. Application teams are moving to the cloud to increase their agility, as a cloud-based model enables the provisioning of machines within hours or even minutes.
- Scalability when needed—IT teams typically find it difficult to keep pace with the demands of scale in their infrastructure, particularly when there is a sudden increase in demand for application load. Organizations are seeking an alternative where they don’t need to plan or invest ahead of time for such increases in demand, and the cloud offers this potential.
- Innovative trends such as big data—trends like high-performance computing, big data, complex event processing and mobile services are hard to configure. Cloud computing provides the option of pay-as-you-go, so organizations can test, develop, and experiment with these innovative technologies.
What Is a Cloud Migration Strategy?
Before migrating to the cloud, there's a checklist of things to take into account. The process, as described by Amazon, encompasses five stages:
- Phase 1: Migration Preparation and Business Planning
- Phase 2: Discovery and Planning
- Phase 3: Designing the Migration
- Phase 4: Migrating and Validating Applications
- Phase 5: Operations
In the second stage, organizations start to map out existing on-premise environments, understand the possibilities offered by their cloud provider, and consider what shape each application should take in the public cloud. This is where a migration strategy comes in. Your cloud migration strategy is your vision of how to take your applications into the cloud.
A successful strategy will maximize your value from cloud infrastructure while minimizing migration time, effort, cost and risk.
Gartner published the “5 Rs” model as far back as 2010, which defined all the options available to migrate a specific application to the cloud. Amazon adopted this model and extended it to 6 Rs: Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retire and Retain. In the following sections, we’ll cover each of these in-depth, and explain how to decide which R to choose for your applications.
Understanding the 6 Rs: AWS Migration Strategies in Depth
The following diagram illustrates the migration strategies in terms of cost and time to migrate. Repurchase is the cheapest and fastest option, while Refactor / Rearchitect is the most difficult, but also gives you the biggest opportunity to optimize the application and take advantage of cloud-native features.
1. Repurchase (“Drop and Shop”)
This strategy involves decommissioning the application and replacing it with a cloud-based version, typically on the AWS Marketplace. Effectively, this is a licensing change—instead of using a traditional on-premise license, you can start using the same application as a cloud service. This is a smaller effort than “lift and shift” (see below) because you are not moving anything—just starting a new license agreement in the cloud.
Tip #1: Identify legacy applications that are no longer satisfying business needs
Do you have applications like CRM, ERP, finance or HR applications that are offered in the AWS marketplace? The move to the cloud gives you an opportunity to drop these applications and switch to a cloud-based version, which may also offer an improved feature set.
Tip #2: Use this approach for legacy applications incompatible with the cloud
If you find existing applications that could benefit from the cloud but would be difficult to migrate using “lift and shift”, “drop and shop” could be a good option. It will provide a new and improved feature set, along with the inherent benefits of the cloud platform.
2. Rehost (“Lift and Shift”)
This strategy involves moving applications from the on-premise environment to the cloud without modification. It is commonly used to migrate large-scale legacy applications to meet specific business objectives such as an accelerated product launch timeline.
The Rehost strategy sounds simple, and it is. There are mature tools on AWS which allow you to carry it out with low effort. The downside is that with no changes to the application, it has limited ability to take advantage of the cloud-native environment.
Tip #1: Identify applications that can benefit from the cloud as-is
The sweet spot of lift and shift migrations is to identify applications that can take advantage of the cloud without architectural changes. For example, applications with variable or seasonal loads can, in most cases, take advantage of the cloud without modification. The cloud can make it easy to scale tiers of the application on demand, for example by adding more web servers or adding more database instances to a cluster.
Tip #2: Lift and shift as a first stage
You shouldn’t treat lift and shift as the end of the migration story. Very often, applications can be migrated with lift and shift and then, once in the cloud, re-architected to take advantage of the cloud computing platform. Many migration projects have shown that it is easier to re-architect applications while already in the cloud, as opposed to refactoring an application and then migrating it. This is partly because the cloud makes it easy to spin up realistic dev/test environments.
3. Replatform (“Lift, Tinker and Shift”)
The replatform strategy involves moving applications almost as-is, but replacing some components to take advantage of the cloud.
Tip #1: Identify the low-hanging fruit
Try to identify low-hanging fruit—applications that require only small optimizations before moving to the cloud. In many cases, this involves switching from self-hosted infrastructure to managed services. Another common optimization is switching from commercial software to open source. This can allow you to scale freely on the cloud without worrying about the licensing cost of each additional instance.
Tip #2: Testing and monitoring is crucial
Even though this strategy involves small modifications or swapping of components, for production applications, you must conduct extensive testing, deploy on the cloud and then monitor for an extended period. Pay attention to performance, basic functionality and user metrics—if conversion rates or shopping cart completions are down, there could be a problem.
4. Refactor / Re-Architect
This strategy calls for a complete overhaul of an application to adapt it to the cloud. It is valuable when you have a strong business need for cloud-native features, such as improved development agility, scalability or performance. In many cases, refactoring involves breaking up the application into independent services and transitioning to a microservices architecture.
- The most expensive approach
Refactoring / rearchitecting is the migration strategy that involves the highest costs, the biggest effort and also the most risk. But in reality, many if not most applications end up being refactored for the cloud, either before migration or after. - Reaching the tipping point
Refactoring is not a binary decision, it’s more a question of when—at which point will you reach the tipping point where cloud-native features will outweigh the effort and disruption caused by a refactoring project.
The final two strategies are “passive”—they don’t involve migrating an application to the cloud. Let’s discuss some common reasons why not to move an application to the cloud.
Reasons to Retain applications on-premises
- The business is heavily invested in the on-premise application and may have currently active development projects.
- Legacy operating systems and applications are not supported by cloud environments.
- Application is working well—no business case for the cost and disruption of migration.
- For industries which must adhere to strict compliance regulations that require that data is on-premise.
- For applications that require very high performance, the on-premise option may prove the better choice.
Reasons to Retire applications altogether as part of the migration project
- In many cases, during a migration project you can identify applications that are redundant, and shutting them down can represent a cost saving.
- There may already be existing plans to decommission the application or consolidate it with other applications.
Lift and Shift Your Data to AWS with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
There are many methods for migrating to AWS—however, the lift and shift approach remains the quickest, simplest, lowest-risk and most cost-effective way to get working in the cloud.
The lift and shift migration approach involves migrating your application and connected data to the cloud with little or no changes. Applications are “lifted” from their current environments and “shifted” in their existing state to new premises, such as the cloud. Typically, there are no marked changes to make to the application data flow, architecture or authentication processes.
A successful lift and shift migration strategy, however, requires the right tools. That is why many companies are using solution provides such as NetApp to help them with migration and to assist them with ongoing data management.
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 provides utilizes NetApp SnapMirror® technology, to migrate, replicate, and synchronize files, or any data from on-premise, hybrid or multicloud storage systems architecture. Cloud Volumes ONTAP NetApp data replication tools SnapMirror® and Cloud Sync service will get your data to the cloud.
