After deciding to migrate some or all of your IT assets to the AWS cloud and crafting the right plan and strategy, all that’s left is to perform the migration itself.
No easy task.
Some transitions to a cloud environment take months, especially if potential problems arise.
An essential step at this stage is to research and evaluate which tools you can use to minimize your efforts while also reducing the risk of potential errors.
AWS offers many tools serving different purposes – some for planning and preparation and others – for moving resources from their current environment to the AWS cloud.
Migration Planning and Monitoring Tools
These tools aren’t used to move resources from point A to point B, but rather serve complementary functions like planning, data collection, and tracking.
AWS Migration Hub – the migration hub is like an overarching structure which allows you to oversee and track each stage of your migration process. The main benefit of using this tool is the vast visibility it provides. You can monitor the migration progress of all the resources in an application in real time, receive constant updates, quickly identify and solve issues. The use of the AWS Migration Hub is free since its primary function is to monitor the other tools and resources you’ve already paid for.
AWS Application Discovery Service – this service gathers information about local data centers and interdependencies between workloads. The process takes place before a migration begins as a part of the migration planning stage. The collected data is used to estimate cloud migration costs or to group servers into applications for planning purposes. AWS Application Discovery Service can be integrated with the AWS Migration Hub.
AWS Database and Server Migration Tools
AWS offers two main services for users that want to migrate databases or servers to the cloud – AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Server Migration Service.
We’ve already talked about these two services so if you want to check them out, you can click here for the database migration service or here for the server migration service.
Another similar product is the VMware Cloud on AWS. This tool was jointly developed by VMware and AWS mainly for large businesses with sizable IT operations. The VMware Cloud on AWS helps organizations scale local environments based on vSphere and migrate them to the AWS cloud with dedicated Amazon EC2.
AWS Data Migration Tools
Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration–the transfer acceleration tool facilitates files over a long distance to and out of your Amazon S3 Bucket. This tool helps you get the most out of your bandwidth, which reduces the effects of distance in processing. The advantages of using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration are the speed and consistency of data transfers.
AWS Direct Connect – this service allows you to set up a dedicated network connection between your network and an AWS Direct Connect location. The idea is to set up a private connection between your data center or office and AWS, which can reduce costs and improve bandwidth performance.
AWS Snowball – the snowball tool can be used to migrate large amounts of data at the petabyte level (1 PB=1000 TB or 1,000,000 GB). As organizations gather and produce more and more data daily, the terabyte is starting to get left behind in favor of the petabyte or exabyte. Tools like the AWS Snowball help facilitate these vast amounts of data.
AWS Snowmobile – as the name would suggest, this tool is similar to the snowball but on a larger scale. The snowmobile supports migrations of vast amounts of data at the exabyte level. One EB equals roughly 1000 PB. Just for reference, a 2003 report titled “How much information?”from the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems estimated that five EB is equivalent to all the words ever spoken by human beings since the dawn of time. While everyone doesn’t agree with this conclusion, you can imagine the enormous amount of data that the AWS Snowmobile can transfer.
Amazon Kinesis Firehose– this final tool is used to load streaming data in AWS. It’s an excellent fit for companies that generate and present data to users in near real-time. The firehose manages and automatically adapts to the performance of the data. This tool doesn’t require any permanent administration, which is a huge advantage since working with streaming data can be time-consuming.
Conclusion
As you can see, AWS offers lots of variety in terms of tools and services you can use.
Just like with every other choice regarding the migration of IT assets to the cloud, the right choice of tools depends on your specific needs.
We’ve been preaching this in the last few articles, but it can’t be stressed enough – having the right strategy based on your actual business goals is what’s important.
There’s a variety of tools for the job, but you have to plan smart before you begin.
That said, there is a learning curve that comes with using specialized AWS tools. If you want to cut that learning curve and focus on your business rather than migrating resources, R&D Solutions can guide you through the migration and manage your IT resources in the cloud. You can learn more about our services here.