Tag Archives: MIgration Evaluator

Migration updates announced at re:Invent 2021

Post Syndicated from Angélica Ortega original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/migration-updates-announced-at-reinvent-2021/

re:Invent is a yearly event that offers learning and networking opportunities for the global cloud computing community. 2021 marks the launch of several new features in different areas of cloud services and migration.

In this blog, we’ll cover some of the most important recent announcements.

AWS Mainframe Modernization (Preview)

Mainframe modernization has become a necessity for many companies. One of the main drivers fueling this requirement is the need for agility, as the market constantly demands new functionalities. The mainframe platform, due to its complex dependencies, long procurement cycles, and escalating costs, makes it impossible for companies to innovate at the needed pace.

Mainframe modernization can be a complex undertaking. To assist you, we have launched a comprehensive platform, called AWS Mainframe Modernization, that enables two popular migration patterns: replatforming, and automated refactoring.

AWS Mainframe Modernization flow

Figure 1. AWS Mainframe Modernization flow

AWS Migration and Modernization Competency

Application modernization is becoming an important migration strategy, especially for strategic business applications. It brings many benefits: software licensing and operation cost optimization, better performance, agility, resilience, and more. Selecting a partner with the required expertise can help reduce the time and risk for these kinds of projects. In the next section, you’ll find a summary of the experience required by a partner to get the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency. More information can be found at AWS Migration Competency Partners.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN)

AWS MGN is recommended as the primary migration service for lift and shift migrations. Customers currently using AWS Server Migration Service are encouraged to switch to it for future migrations.

Starting in November 2021, AWS MGN supports agentless replication from VMWare vCenter versions 6.7 and 7.0 to the AWS Cloud. This new feature is intended for users who want to rehost their applications to AWS, but cannot install the AWS Replication Agent on individual servers due to company policies or technical restrictions.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Two of the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework are Operational Excellence and Reliability. Both are directly concerned with the capability of a service to recover and work efficiently. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is a new service to help you to minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable, and recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. It uses storage, compute, point-in-time recovery, and cost-optimization.

AWS Resilience Hub

AWS Resilience Hub is a service designed to help customers define, measure, and manage the resilience of their applications in the cloud. This service helps you define RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and evaluates the configuration to meet the requirements defined. Aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, this service can recover applications deployed with AWS CloudFormation, and integrates with AWS Fault Injection Simulator, AWS Systems Manager, or Amazon CloudWatch.

AWS Migration Hub Strategy Recommendations

One of the critical tasks in a migration is determining the right strategy. AWS Migration Hub can help you build a migration and modernization strategy for applications running on-premises or in AWS. AWS Migration Hub Strategy Recommendations were announced on October 2021. It’s designed to be the starting point for your cloud journey. It helps you to assess the appropriate strategy to transform your portfolios to use the full benefits of cloud services.

AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces (Preview)

Refactoring is the migration strategy that requires the biggest effort, but it permits you to take full advantage of cloud-native features to improve agility, performance, and scalability. AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is the starting point for incremental application refactoring to microservices in AWS. It will help you reduce the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building and operating your AWS infrastructure for incremental refactoring.

AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) is a service that helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely.

AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is a new free feature of AWS DMS that enables you to quickly build a database and analytics migration plan, by automating the discovery and analysis of your fleet. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor is intended for users looking to migrate a large number of database and analytic servers to AWS.

AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET is a new free tool and simplifies the process of re-architecting applications into smaller code projects. Modernize and transform your .NET applications with an assistive tool that analyzes source code and runtime metrics. It creates a visual representation of your application and its dependencies.

This tool visualizes your applications source code, helps with code refactoring, and assists in extraction of the code base into separate code projects.  Teams can then develop, build, and operate independently to improve agility, uptime, and scalability.

AWS Migration Evaluator

AWS Migration Evaluator (ME) is a migration assessment service that helps you create a directional business case for AWS Cloud planning and migration. Building a business case for the cloud can be a time-consuming process on your own. With Migration Evaluator, organizations can accelerate their evaluation and decision-making for migration to AWS. During 2021, there were some existing improvements to mention:

  • Quick Insights. This new capability of Migration Evaluator, provides customers with a one-page summary of their projected AWS costs, based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization.
  • Enhanced Microsoft SQL Discovery. This is a new feature of the Migration Evaluator Collector, which assists you by including your SQL Server environment in their migration assessment.
  • Agentless Collection for Dependency Mapping. The ME Collector now enables agentless network traffic collection to be sent to the customer’s AWS Migration Hub account.

AWS Amplify Studio

This is a visual development environment that offers frontend developers new features to accelerate UI development with minimal coding, while integrating with Amplify. Read Introducing AWS Amplify Studio.

Conclusion

Migration is a crucial process for many enterprises as they move from on-premises systems to the cloud. It helps accelerate your cloud journey, and offers additional tools and methodologies created by AWS. AWS has created and is continually improving services and features to optimize the migration process and help you reach your business goals faster.

Related information

Accelerating your Migration to AWS

Post Syndicated from John O'Donnell original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/accelerating-your-migration-to-aws/

The key to a successful migration to AWS is a well thought out plan, informative tools, prior migration experience, and quality implementation. In this blog, we will share best practices for planning and accelerating your migration. We will discuss two key concepts of a migration: Portfolio Assessment and Migration. So, let’s get started.

Figure 1. AWS recommended tools for migration

Figure 1. AWS recommended tools for migration

Portfolio Assessment

The Portfolio Assessment is the first step. AWS tools help you assess and make informed business and technical decisions quickly. This is a critical first step on your journey that will define benefits, provide insights, and help you track your progress.

Build a business case with AWS Migration Evaluator

The foundation for a successful migration starts with a defined business objective (for example, growth or new offerings). In order to enable the business drivers, the established business case must then be aligned to a technical capability (increased security and elasticity). AWS Migration Evaluator (formerly known as TSO Logic) can help you meet these objectives.

To get started, you can choose to upload exports from third-party tools such as Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or install a collector agent to monitor. You will receive an assessment after data collection, which includes a projected cost estimate and savings of running your on-premises workloads in the AWS Cloud. This estimate will provide a summary of the projected costs to re-host on AWS based on usage patterns. It will show the breakdown of costs by infrastructure and software licenses. With this information, you can make the business case and plan next steps.

Discover more details with ADS

AWS Application Discovery Service (ADS) is the next step in your journey. ADS will discover on-premises or other hosted infrastructure. This includes details such as server hostnames, IP and MAC addresses, resource allocation, and utilization details of key resources.

It is important to know how your infrastructure interacts with other servers. ADS will identify server dependencies by recording inbound and outbound network activity for each server. ADS will provide details on server performance. It captures performance information about applications and processes by measuring metrics such as host CPU, memory, and disk utilization. It also will allow you to search in Amazon Athena with predefined queries.

You can use the AWS Application Discovery Service to discover your on-premises servers and plan your migrations at no charge.

Plan and manage with AWS Migration Hub

Now that your discovery data has been collected, it’s time to use AWS Migration Hub. AWS Migration Hub automatically processes the data from ADS and other sources. It assists with portfolio assessment and migration planning to help determine the ideal application migration path.

AWS Migration Hub provides a single location to visualize and track the progress of application migrations. AWS Migration Hub provides key metrics on individual applications, giving you visibility into the status of migrations.

Now that we have a view into the portfolio progress, we can begin the Migration phase.

Migration – Accelerating with AWS recommended tools

Migration can begin when you have completed your Portfolio Assessment. You can use AWS recommended tools to accelerate the process in a flexible, automated, and reliable manner.

Rehost with AWS Application Migration Service (MGN)

One approach to migration is known as rehosting (lift-and-shift). It is the most common approach, and uses AWS-recommended tools to automate the process. Rehosting takes an operating system that’s running the application and moves it from the existing hypervisor and rehosts it onto Amazon EC2.

AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) provides nearly continuous block-level replication of on-premises source servers to a staging area in your designated AWS Account. It is designed for rapid, mass-scale migrations. AWS MGN minimizes the previous time-intensive and error-prone manual processes. It automatically converts your source servers from physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure to run natively on AWS. After confirming that your launched instances are operating properly on AWS, you can decommission your source servers. You can then choose to modernize your applications by leveraging additional AWS services and capabilities.

For each source server that you want to migrate, you can use AWS MGN for a free period of 2,160 hours. If used continuously, this would last about 90 days. Most customers complete migrations of servers within the allotted free period.

Replatform with AWS App2container

Some of your workloads won’t require a full server migration, such as moving web applications.

AWS App2Container allows you to containerize your existing applications and standardize a single set of tooling for monitoring, operations, and software delivery. Containerization allows you to unify infrastructure and skill sets needed to operate your applications, saving on both infrastructure and training costs. AWS App2Container (A2C) is a tool for replatforming .NET and Java web-based applications directly into containers.

In this case, you select the application you want to containerize. Then, A2C packages the application artifact and identified dependencies into container images, configures the network ports, and generates the needed definitions. A2C provisions the cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines required to deploy the containerized application into production. With A2C, you can modernize your existing applications and standardize the deployment and operations through containers.

App2container is a free offering, though you will be charged for AWS resources created by the service.

Replatform and synchronize data with AWS Database Migration Service

In many cases, you must move on-premises databases to AWS. Moving large amounts of data and synchronizing to another location can be a real challenge, requiring custom or expensive vendor-specific tooling.

There are two great use cases for AWS Database Migration Service (DMS).

  1. Customers may want to migrate to Amazon RDS databases and/or change from one platform to another, for example, from Oracle to Postgres.
  2. Customers may want to migrate to EC2-hosted databases.

DMS migrates and synchronizes databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source (on-premises) database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime until you are ready to cut over. DMS supports most open source and commercial databases.

DMS is free for six months when migrating to Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, or Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility).

Summary

This post illustrates some of the AWS tooling in addition to offering some recommendations on accelerating your migration journey. It is important to keep in mind that every customer portfolio and application requirements are unique. Therefore, it’s essential to validate and review any migration plans with business and application owners. With the right planning, engagement, and implementation, you should have a smooth and rapid journey to AWS.

If you have any questions, post your thoughts in the comments section.

For further reading: