A study of the The report of Statista points out that 80% of companies are running applications or experimenting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their preferred cloud platform.
You may also be considering moving to AWS; and it is normal that some doubts arise related to this process. After all, it's a migration, and it needs to be successful.
Check out, below, some tips for the migration process to be carried out in the best possible way!
Migration to AWS: Why?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides more than 100 cloud computing services that allow you to configure dynamic, scalable, and automated computing environments.
Here are the main reasons to migrate to AWS:
One of the main benefits of AWS is that companies only pay for the services and resources they use.
- it doesn't matter if you're switching cloud computing services or migrating to the cloud for the first time; AWS elasticity allows you to scale resources up or down;
- thanks to pay-as-you-go pricing from AWS, you can reduce the cost of your IT operations; this allows you to align your business resources with demand;
- when using AWS, you never have to worry about your data disappearing or replicating without your consent; you can keep it in your preferred format and retain full ownership. With many layers of security, you can ensure the integrity of your data employing AWS data centers;
- Amazon is way ahead of its competition in the cloud computing space; its dedication to innovation allows it to dominate the market, making it difficult for competitors to catch up. Amazon launches hundreds of services each year and shows no signs of slowing down.
Now one thing is certain: whether you are migrating to AWS to reduce costs, improve resource utilization, or take advantage of new infrastructure resources not available on the internal infrastructure, the migration will be a non-trivial effort.
→ Learn more: AWS Benefits!
5 Tips for a Successful Migration to AWS
Migrating to the cloud is a complex endeavor and there are many challenges you may face in your AWS migration project.
Here are some common challenges and tips on how to solve them!
1. Resilience for compute and network resources
Challenge:
You must ensure that applications hosted on AWS are highly available and resilient. Cloud machine instances don't last forever; therefore, you need to find a way to preserve application state when the application moves between machine instances.
In addition, you need to ensure resilient connectivity—ensuring that your cloud workloads have access to the network at all times.
Solution:
On the compute side, you can opt for Reserved Instances to ensure your machine instances stay yours for an extended period of time, but this comes at a cost. Set up replication or use a service that manages deployment and availability, such as Elastic Beanstalk.
On the network side, if you are working in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon provides active/standby IPSec tunnels and the AWS Direct Connect service that creates a direct connection from your company's network to the VPC.
Use a combination of both to ensure a highly resilient network.
2. Log analysis and metrics collection
Challenge:
After migrating to AWS, you will find yourself in a highly scalable and dynamic environment.
Your previous strategies for logging and monitoring your apps may no longer be relevant. It's crucial to centralize the data, because you won't be able to analyze a log on the machine images that were shut down yesterday.
Solution:
Make sure your application logs, AWS services, and S3 buckets are centrally stored and monitored.
Leverage Amazon CloudWatch and see Amazon's reference architecture for centralized logging using CloudWatch, Lambda, and Cognito.
3. Cost Management
Challenge:
Many organizations move to the cloud without establishing clear KPIs on how much they expect to spend or save after the migration. It is therefore difficult to understand whether the migration was economically successful.
In addition, cloud environments are dynamic and costs can change rapidly as you adopt new services or scale applications up and down.
Solution:
Before migrating, create a clear business case and understand how much your cloud migration should save you or how much you expect it to add to your cost in exchange for new features you don't have on-premises.
Create a cost-effective model to simulate how much you will spend on AWS on applications, services, and projects. It can be helpful to use an AWS calculator so you can more accurately plan your budget.
As with everything in life, reality will be different from your initial model; therefore, monitor costs continuously and identify deviations from the original cost model, investigate and resolve them before they turn into big surprises.
4. Security Planning
Challenge:
Challenge Cloud environments can be just as secure as on-premises environments, but their security properties and strategies are radically different.
There is a great risk of a “security vacuum” as applications move from on-premises to the cloud, but existing security tools and strategies do not keep up.
Solution:
Map the security and compliance requirements of all applications in your migration project.
Identify AWS services and solutions that can provide equivalent or better security measures than what you have in place today.
And build these services into your deployment plan, ensuring that no application enters the cloud — even in the development and testing phases — without proper security measures.
See Amazon's cloud security guidelines.
5. Moving your data on-premises and managing your storage on AWS
Challenge:
How do you seamlessly move your data from your current on-premises location to the cloud? Here are the challenges:
- maintain user experience: Higher latency and insufficient bandwidth can have an adverse impact on your application's performance.
- Achieve resiliency: Enterprises must pay attention to maintaining resiliency and high availability for volumes of data in the cloud.
- monitor and have centralized operations: While some monitoring tools can be used to keep track of data flows across AWS, this can cause fragmented visibility between the on-premises and AWS environments.
Solution:
To address these challenges, it is important to consider solutions offered by AWS, such as AWS Direct Connect, which can help them achieve highly resilient, dedicated connections between their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and on-premises infrastructure.
This can also help to synchronize your operations and create a central point of visibility.
You can also use Amazon CloudWatch to reduce the impact of migration on your user experience. CloudWatch can help identify performance issues in real time and resolve the root cause before users are affected.
Are you preparing to migrate to AWS? make contact with us and see how we can help you!
