In recent times, it has been continuously observed that industries have started to offload their running applications to cloud platforms like – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure, etc. There could be multiple reasons to do so. For example: To increase the operational expenditure (OpEx) and to decrease capital expenditure (CapEx), the economy of scale, go to market in no time, etc. Having said that, as per Gartner’s reports, undoubtedly, AWS is the market leader in the cloud provider race for so long. Hence, in this blog, we shall go through the details about the cloud adoption strategies as well as the 3 most used AWS migration services to migrate application servers, databases, etc. by enterprises in recent times.
To begin with, cloud computing has provided immense benefits over traditional infrastructure regardless of the organization’s size, usage, and business areas. In other words, it is the way to remain economically stable in the recent time of uncertainty. It not only increases the efficiency of the business but also measures the required changes in the business models of the companies. Let’s explore the most common reasons to adopt cloud computing to offload the traditional infrastructure of the business.
Most common reasons for cloud adoption:
1. Economical benefits
The main reason why small and medium SMEs could not survive in the market is the huge upfront cost to be invested. Luckily, cloud computing is proven a boon to such industries as you only have to pay per your usage. It helps them to reduce expenditure and promote savings as you only have to spend on the operational expenditures only and you can eliminate unnecessary costs.
2. Scalability at ease
As per today’s market needs, every organization is growing at a rapid pace. To mitigate the current changing time, cloud computing provides scalability with all the infrastructure resources like – computing, storage, and networking needs. If the business is evolving demands, there would be huge requirements for resources and on another hand, if the business plan could not go as per plan, one needs to downgrade the resource usability by releasing them out. Cloud computing provides the flexibility of such requirements on the go.
3. Security
The most common reason why few industries were afraid to adopt the cloud to their business was security. Over time, cloud-based solutions have become so mature that the biggest giants of the market are not using the cloud-based solution for their companies as they are more secure than onsite applications. This is applicable to small case businesses as well. Furthermore, the cloud platform provides security against security breaches such as – network outages, power unavailability, hardware failure, common human errors, and many more.
Apart from these, there could be multiple reasons for cloud adoption like – the promotion of technological innovation, the ability to work from anywhere, disaster recovery, competitiveness, easy application integration, standardization, etc.
Before we start with the actual AWS services which are widely used right now in the market, let’s take a quick look on what are the migration strategies.
Migration strategies
An approach to migrating a workload on AWS cloud is commonly known as migration strategies. There are mainly 7 strategies which are famous to be known as 7Rs.
- Retire
- Rehost
- Retain
- Relocate
- Replatform
- Repurchase
- Re-architect
Now. let’s explore the main AWS services that are being used for the cloud migration area of work.
Service-1: AWS Application Discovery Services (AWS ADS)
AWS Application Discovery Service (AWS ADS) is a device that assists an organization with arranging application movements to Amazon Web Services. AWS ADS gathers information from an endeavor’s on-premises data center infrastructure to provide insight into server dependencies, usage patterns, and more. ADS records inbound and outbound server traffic and catches data connected with the utilization of assets like memory and computer processors.
All you need is an AWS account and create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user to assign required policies and initiate the deployment. An IT professional can access AWS ADS and enable data collection through the AWS Management Console, the AWS Discovery software development kit, or the AWS Command Line Interface. It will automatically analyze all the infrastructure needs on the on-premises servers and generates the data report so that you can get a complete insight into the existing server behavior and integration with different applications. Also, AWS ADS provides the facility for both – agent-based and agent less discovery to the source servers.
Hence, before the actual migration, this is the first step to getting a clear idea about the existing server and its behavior.
Service-2: AWS Migration Services (AWS MGN)
AWS MGN which is also known as AWS migration service is the primary migration service recommended for lift and shift migration to AWS. It helps to migrate the existing physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers to run natively on AWS without changes and even with minimal downtime.
Actually, AWS MGN is based on Cloudendure migration but it is available on the AWS management console and integrates with other AWS services easily. In a nutshell, as per AWS official documentation, the following is the process of how AWS MGN works.
Service-3: AWS Database Migration Services (AWS DMS)
AWS DMS is a service that is specifically designed to migrate the database from the on-premises database infrastructure to AWS database instances. AWS DMS can migrate all kinds of data ranges like – relational databases, No SQL databases, data warehouses, etc. from different database flavors. It is smart enough to handle one-time data migration or continual data replication with ongoing changes by keeping sources and targets in sync.
At the time of writing this blog, AWS DMS supports migrations of the following database platforms as a source:
- Amazon Aurora
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- Amazon S3
- MariaDB
- Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
- MongoDB
- IBM Db2
- Microsoft Azure SQL
- Microsoft SQL Server
- SAP ASE
Summary
In short, cloud migration is one of the emerging areas where organizations are moving towards cloud-based solutions to migrate their running loads. With the help of versatile services of AWS like – AWS ADS, AWS MGN, and AWS DMS, we can easily migrate to the AWS cloud platform with full of flexibility, availability, and security. In re:invent of 2022, AWS announces more features of the mentioned services. In the upcoming time, it is expected that AWS may launch new services on the server migration areas to make the transformation even easier than it is right now.
