AWS Cloud Migration: Strategies, Tools, & Processes

Data is a crucial asset for almost every organization that uses modern business processes. It empowers you to make informed decisions, improve the efficacy of your underlying operations, and drive growth. However, to maintain data accessibility even during dire situations like system failure, natural disasters, or data breaches, you need future-proof storage methods.

Relying solely on your on-premises infrastructure can pose several difficulties, such as scalability issues, high maintenance charges, and potential downtime. This article emphasizes the need to migrate your data to cost-effective cloud storage solutions like AWS (Amazon Web Services). It will introduce you to various strategies, tools, and challenges involved in AWS Cloud migration and explain how to achieve this transition smoothly.

What Is AWS Cloud Migration?

AWS Cloud migration is the process of shifting your organization’s digital assets, IT resources, applications, and databases from on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Cloud platform. You need to actively plan, execute, and manage the migration to transition your data environment successfully and achieve operational efficiency.

Why Migrate to AWS Cloud?

AWS is the leading cloud infrastructure provider that dominates its competitors by holding 31% of the market share. By migrating to this widely trusted platform, you can gain numerous advantages. Some of them are listed below:

• Scalability and Flexibility: AWS offers on-demand, elastic resources that you can scale up or down based on your fluctuating workloads. This helps you ensure optimal resource utilization without the risk of over-provisioning or under-provisioning.‍
• High Availability: AWS employs the concept of Regions and Availability Zones (AZs). Each Region has multiple isolated AZs, each consisting of one or more data centers connected with high throughput, low latency, and highly redundant networking. This ensures your cloud infrastructure provides high availability and fault tolerance.
• ‍Access to Advanced Technology: With AWS, you can access technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT) services. It enables you to train, build, and deploy models for your use cases.
• ‍Security and Compliance: Your data is protected by security measures, such as regular security audits, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and encryption. AWS also complies with assurance programs like FISMA, ISO 9001, PCI DSS Level 1, and more.
• ‍Cost-Efficiency: AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, letting you pay only for the resources you use. This saves you from the high capital expenses required for in-house hardware and software.

7 Rs of AWS Cloud Migration Strategies

While migrating to AWS can significantly enhance your IT infrastructure, it doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to choose the right cloud migration strategies depending on your business requirements. Below are the seven Rs of migration strategies that you should consider:

Rehost (Lift-and-Shift)

The rehost strategy allows you to move applications from your existing source platforms (physical, virtual, or another cloud) to the AWS Cloud without modifying them. This approach ensures there are no compatibility or performance issues during the transition and is ideal for large-scale migration.

Relocate (Hypervisor-Level Lift and Shift)

The relocate strategy enables you to move multiple servers or applications from on-premises platforms (Kubernetes or VMware) to respective cloud versions. You can also use it to transfer instances or objects between virtual private clouds (VPCs), AWS Regions, or AWS accounts. This strategy doesn’t require modification of the workloads’ underlying architecture or configurations.

Replatform (Lift and Reshape)

Using the replatform strategy, you can migrate your applications to the cloud while optimizing them to improve performance, reduce costs, and leverage cloud-native capabilities. It helps you modernize your workloads without rewriting application code, saving time and resources. For example, migrating from Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

Repurchase (Drop and Shop)

The repurchase strategy allows you to replace your existing on-prem applications with vendor-based SaaS or cloud-based offerings. However, you should ensure the new solution provides more business value than the previous one and offers zero infrastructure maintenance, reduced costs, and high accessibility.

Refactor (Re-Architect)

While the refactoring strategy is considered the most complex migration option, it is also the most future-proof method. It involves redesigning your application's data architecture by leveraging cloud-native features to improve agility and performance. Using this strategy, you can break a single application into microservices and achieve high availability and automation.

Retire

The retire strategy allows you to downsize or archive applications that have been replaced by newer solutions or are no longer needed in production. You can decommission the application’s underlying servers and reduce operational costs. An example of this includes retiring zombie applications (applications with less than 5% of average CPU and memory usage).

Retain (Revisit)

The retain strategy is used when you are not ready to migrate your applications or if they are still valuable in their current environment. This might be due to dependencies on other applications or a lack of immediate business benefits. However, you might opt to migrate these applications in the future.

AWS Cloud Pre-Migration Checklist

Before migrating your data assets to the AWS Cloud, you must have a well-defined plan. Below is a checklist to guide your pre-migration process:

• Create a visual representation of your network architecture. This helps you understand your existing IT environment, including applications, data, and workloads, and identify their dependencies.
• Then, outline your migration goals and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you wish to monitor to keep track of your progress.
• Examine your existing security policies, identify gaps and compliance requirements, and verify if AWS offers the necessary tools to protect and govern your data.
• You can now choose an appropriate AWS migration strategy based on your business needs.
• The next step is to assess the cloud resources you might require to implement migration. This will help you determine the approximate cost of executing the process. For more details, you can explore the various pricing models AWS offers.
• Set up your proof of concept (PoC) to test AWS services with a smaller workload and identify potential risks.
• To prevent data loss, you must ensure that your critical data is backed up before you start the migration process.

How to Migrate to AWS Cloud?

Cloud migration using AWS is a three-phase process: Pre-Migration, Migration, and Post-Migration. The pre-migration steps have already been discussed in the previous section, so let’s move on to the migration and post-migration phases.

Migration Phase

Once you have confirmed that your PoC works properly, you can begin migrating more complex workloads. This phase involves a cyclic process of converting the schema, migrating data, updating the application, and testing.

If you plan on implementing rehost or replatform strategies, you can skip schema conversion as it doesn’t require changing the database engine. However, if you are performing heterogeneous database migration, you need to follow the steps below:

• Schema Conversion: If your migration involves rearchitecting your application, you must convert your database schema because your source and target database engines will be different. AWS offers a free tool, AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT), to automate most of this process.
• ‍Data Migration: The AWS DMS tool can help you with data migration. It enables you to maintain the source database's operations while replicating data to the target database. You can choose between a one-time data copy and continuous replication. Once the target database is synchronized with the source, you can switch operations to the target database. Apart from this tool, you can also use several AWS DMS alternatives to perform AWS Cloud migration.
• ‍Application Updation: Database migrations extend beyond moving data itself. You also need to consider the applications that interact with the database and ensure their compatibility with the new environment. While object-relational mappings (ORMs) simplify the process by abstracting the database, applications with custom database interactions or dynamic SQL queries may require significant adjustments.

Post-Migration Phase

Once your application and data are successfully migrated to AWS, you can begin the post-migration phase. This phase focuses on optimizing your cloud environment and monitoring performance. You can consider the points below to get started:

• Migration Testing: In this step, you need to validate data accuracy, check application functionality, and assess overall performance. It helps you ensure all features work as expected and identify and address bottlenecks through iterative bug fixing and optimizations.
• ‍Performance Monitoring and Alerts: You can use AWS CloudWatch to monitor key metrics such as memory, CPU, and I/O utilization across your cloud environment. It allows you to set thresholds and alarms over these metrics and trigger actions accordingly, minimizing the downtime and damage to your business.

AWS Cloud Migration Tools

There are numerous AWS Cloud migration tools available in the market that you can use:

#1. AWS Migration Services

Along with AWS DMS, the AWS platform provides various cloud services to streamline the data transfer process. Some of these services include:         

• Application Migration Service (AMS): The AMS tool is designed to simplify the migration of applications to AWS.  It helps you achieve this with minimal downtime.
• ‍AWS DataSync: This tool allows you to automate data transfers between on-premises storage and AWS while handling encryption, data integrity validation, and network optimization.
• ‍AWS Migration Hub: It provides a central location to monitor the progress of your application migrations across various AWS and partner solutions.

#2. Airbyte

Although AWS provides various migration services, they sometimes lack the flexibility to let you integrate diverse data sources, including non-AWS platforms. This is where Airbyte, an AI-powered data replication and integration tool, can help you.

With Airbyte, you can effortlessly transfer data from on-prem systems or any other system to AWS using its library of over 550 pre-built connectors. This collection also includes connectors for AWS platforms like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Kinesis, Amazon S3, S3 Glue, and AWS Data Lake.

The tool also allows you to build connectors from scratch using Connector Builder, a low-code Connector Development Kit (CDK), Python CDK, or Java CDK. You can speed up the development by leveraging the AI assistant available in the Connector Builder.

Some other features of Airbyte include:

• Multiple Deployment Options: You have the flexibility to build data pipelines according to your needs. The options include PyAirbyte (open-source Python library), easy-to-use UI, Terraform Provider, or APIs.‍
• GenAI Workflows: Airbyte lets you load semi-structured, structured, and unstructured data directly into vector database destinations to simplify your GenAI workflows.
• ‍Change Data Capture: Using the CDC feature, you can configure Airbyte to capture only the latest data changes at the source and migrate them to your cloud platform. This helps you minimize the data transfer time and optimize the migration process.‍
• Self-Managed Enterprise Edition: Airbyte has also announced the general availability of the Self-Managed Enterprise edition. This version offers highly scalable data ingestion capabilities and complete control over sensitive data that you migrate to cloud-based platforms.

To get further details on how you can utilize Airbyte to perform AWS Cloud migration or any other use case, you can talk to experts.

#3. Carbonite Migrate

Carbonite Migrate is a cloud data migration tool that offers a streamlined, secure solution for migrating physical, virtual, and cloud workloads across any data environment. It enables you to continuously replicate data in real time with minimal risk, quick cutovers, and near-zero downtime.

#4. CloudFuze

CloudFuze is a cloud-to-cloud migration platform. It allows you to transfer large volumes of files, documents, and data from cloud storage services such as Dropbox Business to Amazon S3. With CloudFuze, you can implement high-speed data migrations, file permission migration, and one-way and two-way sync.

The tool provides over 40 connectors with security protocols such as OAuth 2.0 for secure cloud authentication. CloudFuze also ensures data governance by complying with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and ISO 27001 standards.

AWS Cloud Migration Challenges

While there are many reasons to perform cloud migration with AWS, you should also consider the following challenges that come along with it:

• Resilient Computing and Networking Resources: Cloud instances are transient; they are not available forever. This requires you to maintain high resiliency during cloud migration to AWS, which can be quite difficult. You need to develop strategies to preserve the application state across instances and guarantee continuous network access to avoid downtime or disruptions.
• ‍New Logging Methods: Once you migrate to AWS, your data environment will be highly scalable and dynamic. Your previous approaches to logging might be insufficient for analyzing logs from temporary cloud instances.
• ‍Cost Management: Due to the dynamic nature of cloud infrastructures, service costs also fluctuate. Before committing to a plan, you need to consider several factors, such as the level of scalability you want and the add-ons you might require. This can be a very confusing process and lead to extra expenses.  

Key Takeaways

AWS Cloud migration is a strategic plan that can significantly enhance your IT infrastructure's scalability, security, and cost-efficiency.  However, it requires thorough planning before you start executing it, as it can lead to unexpected costs, downtime, and data loss. You need to get familiar with the various migration strategies, tools, and challenges to transition your existing data environment successfully to the cloud.