AWS Migration in a nutshell

Here are some of my learnings the tools AWS provides for a seamless migration of an application to cloud.

For any business critical SaaS application, two very important layers are the database and the web layer and AWS just mirrors these with Database Migration Service (DMS) and Application Migration Service (MGN) . On the other hand, AWS Migration Hub makes this migration journey trackable in a single console.

1) AWS Application Discovery Service provides agents to install on your DB and Application servers to offer insights about what resources you might need to move to AWS cloud. Here is the snapshot of the collector data which I received for my DB and App servers from AWS.

Based on the above stats, AWS recommends resources needed in the cloud environment, for eg. EC2 instance types or DB offerings in a csv file which can be reviewed by the stake holders and decision makes for the migration strategy.

AWS also provides a nice cool network graph of what resources/servers your App/Web servers are connected OnPrem too!

2) Database Migration service offered by AWS acts like a mediator and needs both a source endpoint (source db) and a target endpoint . Target endpoint could be any of the DB offerings provided by AWS. DMS supports both homogeneous (MySQL to MySQL) and heterogeneous (MySQL to Oracle).

3) In my case, I moved a MySQL OnPrem to AWS MySQL RDS. This is how it shows up when the DB migration is complete.

4) AWS Application Migration strategy offers 7 Rs namely Rehost, Relocate, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire and Retain.

A detailed description of the above is out of scope for this article. For my migration, I used the Rehost strategy

5) AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) ‘rehosts’ the servers to AWS by replicating block-level data from the source target to the cloud. This process can be agent-based or agentless. I used the agent-based replication, which is the default recommendation for most use cases.

MGN supports a lifecycle based transition so that the application being migrated has near-zero downtime. Below is the final state of the application migration in the dashboard. At this point, the OnPrem application can be fully shutdown if the app stakeholders are satisfied with the migration!

There was a lot to go through the migration detail and I kept the article concise. I plan to go into details in the some of the topics in details, so please stay tuned. Feedbacks appreciated.