Checklist for a Successful AWS Cloud Migration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a highly secure cloud services platform. The AWS cloud is the safest way to save data, run applications, and provision a wide variety of cloud computing resources. The process of migrating your current computing system into the AWS Cloud is known as migration. This may include moving your current company data center to the AWS cloud, re-engineering your applications with AWS, or even simply moving some of the organization’s systems to the cloud while leaving others in the current environment.

Businesses are migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in greater numbers than ever before, lured by the cloud provider's key features and benefits, including lower operational costs, scalability, agility, high availability, and disaster recovery. 

Why Do Businesses Migrate to AWS?  

When compared to on-premise deployments and other clouds, Amazon Web Services is the top cloud provider and offers several benefits. Here are some of the reasons why organizations are migrating to AWS:  

• Cost ━ AWS is known for its pay-per-use pricing, but it also offers a wide range of services that allow you to use only the resources you require, lowering expenses. For example, you can execute storage tiering and can save cold data to a low-cost storage service like Amazon Glacier.
• Scalability ━ AWS delivers limitless scalability as well as a variety of ways to manage it, from EC2 auto-scaling to containerized deployments, serverless services, and more.
• Agility ━ AWS provides diverse automation capabilities, integrates with DevOps workflows, and allows teams to instantly spin up development, test, and production environments to iterate quickly. Amazon also makes self-service IT simple by allowing organizational units to set up their infrastructure.
• High availability and disaster recovery ━ Amazon has many data centers across the world, as well as a multi-AZ feature that allows you to host cloud services in various data centers, ensuring that your services continue to run even if one geographical region is affected by a disaster.  

Cloud Migration Checklist in AWS

Understanding the process

Migration must be handled by an expert in AWS, who has ample experience in migrating so that there is no major disruption in the operational flow of business. This checklist is the basic protocol that needs to be followed by organizations, which are aiming for migrating their application to cloud environments.  

Identify resources and responsibilities  

The pre-planning stage begins with identifying your budget, scope, and schedule. Some of the things you should outline during this phase include:

Find an experienced cloud partner

A skilled AWS partner can help you through the migration process, making it faster, smoother, and, ultimately, less expensive.

Remember that you'll be providing this organization with your business data, so your decision should be deliberate and informed. Here are a few things to look for in a migration vendor: 

• 1. Data safety. Professional firms can ensure the confidentiality of your data. An NDA (non-disclosure agreement) is, of course, required.  

•  2. Experience. If you wish to avoid the common AWS cloud migration challenges, be sure your provider has appropriate experience.  

• 3.  Pricing. The migration procedure may be costly, but the experienced vendor can reduce your expenses with a practical framework.  

• 4.  Certification. When you're dealing with AWS Consulting Partners, you can be sure they’re experts with deep technical knowledge.  

You can also choose to migrate databases, applications, storage, and servers on your own. But your success rate will increase exponentially if you decide to work with a professional cloud computing service provider.  

The following steps should be followed while migrating to AWS  

• Step 1: Migration preparation and business planning:  

This is the initial phase in migrating to the cloud, and it involves taking into account the present state of application architecture while designing a project migration activity. To make the process go smoothly and maintain uninterrupted operational efficiency, all elements of the stakeholders engaged in the business and how they will be affected should be examined. A rollback strategy should always be included in a migration plan since, due to unforeseen circumstances, the entire program or a portion of it may fail to migrate to the cloud, and in such scenarios, it should be rolled back to its original environment setup.  

• Step 2: Analysis of current solution and planning:  

The analysis phase entails identifying and understanding the dependencies of the applications and focuses on defining priorities for migrating to the cloud. Less complex and critical applications should preferably be moved first, followed by the more critical ones.   

• Steps 3 & 4: Designing, migrating, and validating applications: 

   

After the migration is done, the next and final step includes addressing individual components of an application. There are six ‘R’s’ that act as references for migrations. The six ‘R’s’ are briefly defined as follows:  

• Re-host – This strategy is the most cost-effective way to migrate non-cloud services to the AWS cloud. Rehosting is a highly automated process that allows both quick migration and several big migrations.  

• Re-platform – This strategy works well when an application's architecture needs to be changed to achieve cloud optimization. Cloud optimization aims to achieve certain objectives, such as minimizing database administration time or migrating to a fully managed cloud.  

• Re-purchase – This process is an approach for moving from a proprietary system to a SaaS platform. Organizations that have workloads that are simple to migrate to new versions ensure a smoother transition with this method.  

• Re-architect – This step is meant for applications that are native to the cloud for incorporating features such as autoscaling to ensure excellent performance. This entails redesigning the application to make use of cloud-native services and architecture.  

• Retire – To make the cloud more effective for an application's operations, it's crucial to figure out which assets should be removed if they're no longer required, and which ones will take more time and effort.  

• Retain – In a few circumstances, organizations may choose to retain some part of their applications on their servers and move the other part to the cloud. This leads to a hybrid approach, which becomes a scenario of continuous reevaluation.  

Migrating to the Amazon Web Services cloud may benefit a company in a variety of ways. AWS is a very cost-effective approach since it allows for resource auto-scaling, which means you only pay for the services you utilize. Transformation to cloud architecture is also a step toward increasing team productivity by offering a consolidated picture of work in progress. It also provides agility to any firm by allowing them to sell their goods much more quickly, giving them a competitive edge. 

It is recommended that an organization must plan on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which might be helpful to measure and validate the migration success rate.