Migrating to Cloud and Running Hybrid: Part 4 - AWS
Migrating to Cloud and Running Hybrid: Part 4 - AWS
For our second technical post in the series, we will look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the public cloud to target for migrating workloads. We are going to look at some of the options that customers have available to them for migrating on-prem workloads to AWS. We already have our data handled through the methods we discussed in the last blog post, so now we are talking about getting the workloads themselves up to the cloud.
One of the main methods that AWS customers may run across or have recommended to them is the AWS Application Migration Service. This tool will handle the migration of your virtual machine through a conversion to an EC2 instance for the OS boot volume. The tool has many additional benefits for AWS customers such as being able to add in disaster recovery and license conversion, but one of the biggest benefits to the users of this tool is that the workload is still up and running during this replication process.
The overall use of the tool requires initializing the service in the AWS portal, then creation of replication templates to be used which control how data replication will work for each server, configuring a launch template which controls what actions are performed once the server is launched on AWS, along with a post-launch template for post-launch actions. It is highly recommended to understand the requirements for the service, including network connectivity, bandwidth, and costs.
If you are focused more on the ability to recover in the cloud during a disaster, or running in a hybrid model, another alternative to investigate is Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS). This tool is capable of setting up a disaster recovery scenario from VMware vSphere or Hyper-V, as well as existing cloud infrastructure, with the ability to recover onto EC2 instances running in AWS.
AWS DRS requires some initial setup but then gives many of the capabilities of other AWS services with access by GUI, API, or CLI, leveraging AWS user management and auditing, plus automation and the ability to replicate or recover even across AWS regions. Similar to the Application Migration Service, it must be initialized from the AWS portal.
Now, there are other alternatives that can assist with a migration from on-prem to AWS, especially if you are not running VMware, but many of these are really only viable if you already have them as they would not be purchased just for a migration to cloud. Most of your backup platforms that support on-prem workloads and cloud providers will give you the capabilities of restoring your existing backups to a cloud provider.
For customers that are planning to run in a hybrid mode between on-prem and public cloud, you also need to give some consideration to infrastructure as code and automation. If you are able to completely separate the provisioning of your environment to be automated and even version controlled, your deployment methods may differ for each environment, but then your infrastructure becomes both composable and disposable.
Once you have made it to the maturity of being able to redeploy your OS platforms and applications as needed, you have reached a much better foundation where your concern can be focused on what is really important to your business - your data.
Hopefully, this gives some insight into the tools that are readily available within AWS, or that you may have within your environment, which you can use to migrate to cloud or enable DR to the cloud. In the next blog of this series, we will jump over to take a look at how to move to Azure.