Migrating to AWS Cloud — a primer

Ask — what do you want to migrate? Do you have a roadmap?

If it is not clear, the organisation needs to have an assessment (popularly called MRA — Migration Readiness Assessment).

Migration Readiness

This could take more than a month if discovery agent is run inside the existing DC network to identify all regular monthly operations.

Migration Dispositions

Now, the team has details about future application workloads, target databases with data volume and cloud native services to be used. One can arrive a cost projection (TCO) for future cloud based hosting.

Next important step includes migration project planning, resource mobilisation and migration process.

Migration Project Planning — It should have Timelines, cost estimate, communication plans and change management process.

Resource Mobilisation — Organisational training and ensuring resource availability.

Migration Process — Start with the Landing Zone modelling and creation and and then find out the pilots to be initiated. The process document should have workload vs timeline vs dependency mapping.

Another important part is tooling for different phases -

1. Assessment phase — MRA, AWS Discovery Service, AWS Migration Hub
2. Readiness and Planning phase — AWS Migration Portfolio Assessment, AWS Control Tower, AWS Platform Library, AWS Migration Hub, AWS Landing Zone
3. Migration Phase — AWS Service Catalog, AWS Migration Hub, CloudEndure, AWS Server Migration Service, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Datasync, AWS Transfer for SFTP, AWS Snowball, AWS Kinesis, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Tools — need to login to Migration hub to check the list of tools available in the region — example

Discovery tools in available in Frankfurt

Partner Tools — https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/migration-tools/partner-tools.html

If you need a quick solution to create a multi-account standardised Landing zone immediately, you can use AWS Landing Zone tool.

AWS Standard Landing Zone

One can find AWS Migration partner details in -

Migration Partner Solutions

This is how AWS migration can happen in a planned way. All consulting organisations have their own tools, techniques and processes which may give customised solution to a specific customer need.

Acknowledgments — AWS Portal, AWS Trainings