AWS Migration: A Step-by-Step Guide

The benefits of AWS migration – like the best experience, performance, and cost-saving outcomes – have become widely understood by startups and large enterprises. Leaders seeking to grow their business through technology found their answer in AWS. They are looking for ways to get to the AWS cloud in the fast, secure, and efficient way possible. 

Amazon Web Services and its broad network of partners are helping organizations migrate to AWS by establishing the balance between cost-saving, and revenue-generation investment. From upfront planning to move through every phase of the AWS migration plan, leaders need to be vigilant and informed to drive transformational, and meaningful impacts.

Backend by the right mindset, proven strategies, tools, and a step-by-step guide, this blog will act as the engine powering your migration journey to reap the benefits of the world’s most secure, and reliable public cloud services provider AWS. 

Benefits of Migrating to AWS

Here is a list of some of the top benefits of AWS cloud migration:

1. Infrastructure Cost Saving

The most obvious yet the biggest benefit of migrating to AWS. According to Economic Validation from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, organizations migrating from on-premises servers to AWS cloud experienced 66% lower 3-year cost of infrastructure operations. 

This economic validation further states the cost-benefit on the storage, compute, and networking.

• 63% lower computing cost by allowing you to only pay for compute time consumed, almost perfect to 1 millisecond. Furthermore, with the help of auto-scaling, you ensure the provisioning of the right amount in real-time.
• 69% lower cost of storage. With the help of the Amazon S3 intelligent pricing tier, it automatically moves the objects across the 4 AWS access tiers to offer cost-effective storage capacity maintaining the performance.
• 66% lower the cost of networking by eliminating the need for physical network equipment like routers, switches, firewalls, and more. Additionally, AWS Direct Connect, use of VPC endpoints reduces the data transfer rates.

2. Achieving Low Latency

AWS has a global infrastructure consisting of 108 availability zones located across 34 regions. This allows you to choose the technology infrastructure closest to your target audience reducing data travel, ultimately reducing latency. 

According to a Nucleus study, businesses that migrated their workload to the AWS cloud experienced a 38% decrease in latency. 

3. Improved Security, and Availability

Amazon Web Services has more than 200 security services, compliance certifications, and governance services to protect your AWS environment. Furthermore, AWS has a broad network of partners to help you maintain end-to-end security with AWS Security Services. 

Businesses that are using AWS experienced the following security benefits:

• 55% reduction in the mean time to detect security incidents.
• 64% reduction in the mean time to resolve security incidents.
• 43% reduction in security events annually.
• 51% lower P0 incidents.
• 24% reduction in P1 incidents.

AWS has multiple redundant availability zones across each region to ensure fault tolerance and support the workload of any scale. It has a multi-AZ (Availability Zone) architecture, which ensures seamless data replication across servers. In the event, that one AZ experiences downtime, while others remain unaffected, ensuring the service continuity. 

Businesses using Amazon Web Services experienced the following benefits:

• 39% reduction in application downtime.
• 69% reduction in unplanned downtime.

AWS Migrations Tools

Amazon Web Services has a portfolio of migration services and tools helping you to migrate from data, database, and entire infrastructure to AWS cloud.

Here we have provided you a glimpse into the AWS migration services, and tools:

1. AWS Migration Evaluator

An AWS migration plan tool that helps in assessing the existing on-premise environment like data, server utilization, etc. 

It allows you to build a customized migration plan that outlines the performance improvements, and cost-saving, allowing you to make a viable decision. 

2. AWS Migration Hub

A centralized cloud inventory management system helps you with unified access to track the migration process across the AWS environment. With the help of journey templates, it visualizes all the migration steps, so they can be executed precisely. 

3. AWS Application Discovery Service

A migration planning tool that helps organizations with detailed insights into their infrastructure, and visualizes applications, servers, and their dependencies. This allows you to plan a data-driven migration journey that brings measurable results.

4. AWS Application Migration Services

A cloud application migration tool that ensures the seamless migration of applications to AWS Cloud. It helps to automate the migration process to reduce the downtime, and complexities associated with the manual migration. 

5. AWS Data Sync

A purpose-built data transfer service that automates, and accelerates the large volume of data migration between on-premise storage and AWS storage. 

What are the Steps in AWS Cloud Migration?

AWS migration is an iterative process that can be summarized into the following four-phase journey:

Step-1: Preparation and Business Planning

Failing to plan is ultimately the plan to fail. This seems true in the case of Amazon Web Services migration. You should have sound planning along with an understanding of your organization’s readiness to migrate to the cloud. Besides this work on identifying the desired outcomes that stakeholders anticipate from the migration. 

This phase involves the following steps:

• Establishing the governance framework.
• Determining the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the migration project.
• Evaluating the compliance requirements.
• Determining the necessary security measures.

Step-2: Portfolio Discovery and Planning

This phase emphasizes building the baseline for the successful migration. It involves a comprehensive assessment of the existing infrastructure for building the inventory of applications, servers, and databases along with their interdependence, and performance data. This understanding allows you to prioritize the application based on their impact, and select the best cloud migration strategy suitable for your business case. 

Step3: Designing, Migrating, and Validating Applications

This is the phase where migration of the application from the physical, virtual, or any cloud platform to the AWS cloud takes place. Each application from the portfolio is designed and migrated according to the migration strategy chosen. 

The key activities involved in this process are the configuration of server replication settings, monitoring the replication process, and executing the cutover from the source server when migration is successfully executed. Later on, it is recommended to execute a validation which includes a performance test, UAT (user acceptance test), and security assessment. This will give you the confidence that your newly migrated application is performing optimally in the AWS environment.

Step-4: Modernize Phase

Now that your application migrated to AWS, it’s time to turn off the cloud system and emphasize modernizing the application to leverage AWS-native benefits. You may consider re-factoring or re-architecting your application to benefit from AWS services such as serverless computing, and containerization. Additionally, you can establish DevOps practices to ensure smooth integration and deployment. 

Modernization is an interactive process that requires continuous improvement to ensure your application remains agile, scalable, and aligned with your business objectives. You can opt for AWS managed services to ensure experts taking care of your application, so you get a better ROI on it in the long run. 

AWS Migration Best Practices

Successful migration is driven by the best practices and strategies yielding positive outcomes. Here is the compilation of the AWS migration best practices to help you migrate to AWS confidently. 

Rightsize Your Resources and Reduce Costs

The biggest benefit of migrating to AWS cloud is the flexibility it offers to run your cloud environment in a way that settles the balance between cost-saving, and performance. Rightsizing resources allows you to ensure that your migrated application optimally uses the computing, networking, and storage capacities, avoiding over-provision, and under-provision. 

 AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA), a free program that can help you to rightsize your compute and license cost, promising significant savings. It analyzes your compute resources and recommends the best instance size and type for each workload. Additionally, you can leverage AWS-native tools like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor to help you flag underutilized resources, so you can make informed decisions for optimal cost saving. 

Document End-to-End Migration Process Early

Migration to the AWS cloud is not a one-man campaign, it is the process driven by the stakeholder of the organization, and migration specialist processing technical aspects. Having a documented migration process outlining the process, and assignment of the responsibilities in the early stage leads to successful migration in the desired timeframe.

The documented process will also help to identify the potential issues, thus developing proactive plans to mitigate those issues. 

3M Company, a leading name in the manufacturing industry, migrated 2,200 applications to the AWS cloud in less than 24 months. The success of this large-scale migration program is attributed to the documented migration process. 3M spent around 8 months designing and planning the migration.

Establish a Single-Source of Truth for Migration Data

Approximately, 80% of the migration projects fail, attributed to the lack of insights, and poor planning (Gartner). The lack of insights could be attributed to multiple factors, however, one of the biggest reasons is siloed data. A single source of truth allows the various teams involved in the migration to be on the same page enabling data-driven decisions.;

A centralized repository can be created that contains all the information for the migration such as application inventory. You can rely on AWS-native tools like AWS Migration Hub, and AWS System Manager to consolidate the data related to migration at a single place. 

Choose the Right AWS Migration Tools

When it comes to the migration tools, AWS is one of the richest cloud service providers. It offers a range of tools specifically catered to facilitate the seamless migration from on-premises servers, or cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to AWS. Thus, it is essential to evaluate your migration requirements to make informed decisions of which tool should be employed. 

For example, AWS Database Migration Service is an appropriate choice for migrating databases to AWS reducing the downtime. Similarly, AWS Server Migration Service is an ideal choice for automating the on-premise server migration to Amazon Web Services.  

How We Can Help You to Migrate to AWS Cloud?

Cyntexa is a certified AWS partner with hands-on experience in both small and large scale migration projects. From assessing the readiness of your existing infrastructure, to modernizing your application on AWS cloud, we have comprehensive support tailored to your requirements. Let’s connect with us to share your migration requirements, and we will ensure the seamless migration with minimal disruption to your business operatons.