On the fourth week of January I had the chance to take the “AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Migrating to AWS – Technical” course which I can recommend for those who want to explore the technical fundamentals of migrating on-premise implementations to the cloud, especially for the AWS partners who should be able to advice the customer to the proper solution, in order reduce cost and increase availability and elasticity while maintaining a secure environment. Note: You must be part of the AWS Partner Network to access this tool Want to try it right away? IO Connect Services is an AWS Advanced Partner level, we can advise and help you get an estimate, contact an expert. In this post I would like to briefly introduce the process and tools suggested by AWS to start a migration from your on-premise infrastructure to the cloud.
AWS offers dozens of services in the cloud that can be used to implement solutions that cover the next areas to name a few: Storage, Networking, Compute, Big Data, Security and much more. Your company can benefit from the features that these services offer, like Disaster Recovery, High Availability and Elasticity. Still you may want to get some quantitative estimates to justify the initial investment of the migration and you would prefer to use the time on the implementation rather than comparing each service one by one manually on how much less a virtual machine or a storage service will cost on the cloud, taking the current on-site implementation as a baseline. This is where Migration Portfolio Assessment (MPA) comes into the picture.
MPA automates the process of portfolio analysis and helps to validate the migration business case. This tool has been created to visualize the current on-premises portfolio, identify the server's migration strategy, estimate the migration project cost, recommend target EC2 (virtual image) instance type and gives a very comprehensive comparison of the on-premises cost to the approximate equivalent AWS service cost.
MPA will also suggest changes to improve the efficiency of your solution, for example, you might be using a couple of powerful processors to execute tasks only during working hours but are kept idle during two-thirds of the day. A recommendation from the tool could be to use cheaper instances with less compute power to divide the work and increase or decrease the number of instances automatically to cover the demand on working hours and then reduce the quantity of servers to save money and maintain the expected level of services.
Some of the features that MPA offers to improve your migration are:
Reduction in costs
Estimate the saving on IT Labor and Support Cost
Compare AWS and On-Premises
Recommend Migration strategy
You still need to collect the data of youron-premise implementation, for example, the OS, CPU, memory and network capacity of your servers, but this step is part of every well planed migration. To make your life easier, AWS offers file templates that you can use as a starting point to collect this information. Once you modify the information with yours, the resulting file will be used by MPA as the main input to analyze your current architecture. Once the analysis has completed, you will get an estimate cost of the migration, but not only that, any reduction in costs that AWS suggest will be presented. The output also includes the recommended strategy to follow as well as the expected ROI.
MPA is still in Beta but it is a promising tool and it will certainly help you to determine the feasibility, effort, cost, tools and resources all leading to migration effort analysis and migration plan creation.
