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6 Successful AWS Cloud Migration Strategies for 2023

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6 Successful AWS Cloud Migration Strategies for 2023

According to Cybersecurity Ventures, 100 zettabytes of data will be stored in the cloud by 2025.

Furthermore, the public cloud market will become $623.3 billion by 2023. These statistics show the dominance of cloud computing in the IT market. 

The primary reason behind moving to the cloud are benefits like scalability, flexibility, cost optimization, advanced-level security, resiliency, reliability, etc. With various cloud migration strategies, you can move your data and applications to the cloud and avail these benefits.  

However, you must pick the right platform for cloud migration. AWS, with a 32% market share, is the leading cloud service provider, followed by Azure (18%) and GCP (9%). 

Keeping the dominance of AWS in mind, in this article, we will explore the cloud migration strategies for AWS along with their pros and cons. So, let’s keep the ball rolling! 

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AWS Cloud Migration Strategies

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1. Rehost/Relocate/Lift and Shift

Rehosting is one of the most popular and easy-to-implement cloud migration strategies. It comprises the transfer of data from on-premise to cloud infrastructure, especially for large-scale enterprises. Suppose you’re on-premise data resides on the Oracle database, and you move it to an AWS EC2 instance; it’s called rehosting or relocating or lift and shift approach. 

Rehosting helps you to enhance the speed and performance of your enterprise application. Many automation tools, such as CloudEndure Migration, AWS VM Import/Export, AWS Application Migration Service, etc., are available for rehosting. In addition, you can also opt for the manual option available if you possess sound technical knowledge related to cloud computing.    

Pros:

  • Easier compliance and security management

  • Smoother migration of core services 

  • No code or architecture changes required

Cons:

  • Legacy and resource intensive-apps can face compatibility issues  

  • It doesn’t provide the benefits of a native platform 

  • If a virtual server goes down, the application can also go down

2. Replatform

Replatform, also known as the ‘lift, shift, and tinker’ strategy, is a modified version of rehosting. It enables you to make a few configurational changes to the application to align it with the cloud-first strategy. The good thing about replatform is that you don’t have to change the core architecture of the application. You can use a replatform for scaling or automation purposes. 

Many developers use replatforming to change how their apps interact with the database. It makes the application run seamlessly on managed cloud platforms like Amazon RDS or Google CloudSQL. Unfortunately, replatforming can sometimes lead to migrations, where you retain all of the technical debt and reap none of the benefits you get with a cloud-native application. 

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Pros:

  • Enables you to have an incremental approach during migration 

  • Cost-efficient technique 

  • Allows you to leverage cloud capabilities

Cons:    

  • Automation is necessary 

  • Customization is complicated 

  • Difficult to define a work scope

3. Refactor/Re-architect

As the name suggests, refactor or re-architect means building your whole product from scratch. It allows you to make the product fully cloud-native and realize its potential using technologies like serverless, containers, microservices, load balancers, etc. The strategy requires you to invest a lot of time and effort but rewards you with fantastic cloud benefits. 

For example, when you’re considering moving from an on-premise monolithic architecture to a serverless one in the cloud, you can opt for refactoring. The refactored applications are highly scalable, agile, and flexible. Moreover, refactoring would require you to focus on planning and have a clear migration roadmap. Otherwise, there is a chance of failure during the migration. 

Pros:

Cons:

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  • Hard to adapt for beginners 

  • Resource-intensive and complex

  • High risk of failure    

4. Repurchase

Repurchase, also known as the “drop and shop” strategy, is about replacing the on-premise applications with cloud-native software. In simple terms, repurchasing pushes you toward the SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Sometimes, repurchasing involves a change of licensing where you drop the existing on-premise license and shop the new one for the cloud. 

Repurchasing can be cost-effective if you’re moving away from a highly complex legacy application. After moving to a cloud platform, you will avail benefits such as higher efficiency, savings on app storage, and lower maintenance costs. The most common example of repurchasing is moving from an on-premise CRM to Salesforce or Hubspot for agility in work. 

Pros:

  • Eliminates software procurement process

  • Simple and fast migration technique 

  • Reduces risk and burden involved in migration

Cons:

  • Doesn’t work for highly customized legacy systems

  • Less control over the application

  • Can cause interoperability issues

5. Retire 

As the name suggests, in this strategy, you retire the applications that no longer prove productive for your business. If some applications are not worth moving to the cloud, you can eliminate them from your product suite. The technique allows you to explore all the applications, their usage, dependencies, and maintenance cost to analyze which one you should retain/retire. 

Turning off or eliminating apps may sound easier in theory, but practically, it’s a very complex process. However, you should do it in the initial stages of migration to save time, money, and effort.

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Pros:

  • Reduces IT spending on infrastructure  

  • Enables optimization of resources

  • Frees up space on ‘on-premise’ servers

Cons:

  • Requires sound technical knowledge

  • Deciding which apps to retire is a complex task 

  • Risk of losing valuable data, if not done right 

6. Retain 

Retain, also known as re-visit, involves visiting your digital assets’ critical applications to decide which applications require refactoring before moving them to the cloud platform. By conducting this survey, you will find some apps that will work well on-premise and have valuable information. Therefore, you should retain those apps for a seamless cloud migration procedure. 

In other cases, you must retain applications due to latency requirements, compliance, or regulatory constraints. Lastly, you may need to retain applications where migration could be more cost-effective. Keeping such applications ensures the smooth conduct of business operations in a hybrid cloud where a large-scale migration takes a few years to complete. 

Pros:

  • No migration cost involved 

  • Provides benefits of both on-premise and cloud

  • Minimum disruption to user experience

Cons:

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  • No areas for technical improvements

  • Deal with a lot of tech debt 

  • Interoperability may be an issue

Wrapping Up Things

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Cloud migration is not like walking on a bed full of roses. You may encounter many thorns before realizing their potential and availing numerous benefits. However, you can pull off cloud migration with the proper technical knowledge, experience, and expertise. You only need to choose the right cloud migration strategy and a cloud provider according to your architecture and application.

AWS is one of the leading cloud providers and thus, businesses prefer to move their data and applications to that platform. 

You, too, can adopt these strategies and move to AWS to avail cloud computing benefits!


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Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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