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AWS Partner: Accreditation (Technical)

Transcript for Introduction to Migration Strategies video

You have just learned about using a structured framework called AWS Cloud Adoption
Framework, or AWS CAF. This framework guides customers in progressing their current
business and IT landscape to a more cloud-ready architecture. AWS CAF helps to uncover
existing gaps an organization might have and gets it to a stage of readiness.

To make decisions about the workloads you are migrating, you must fully understand the
migrating environment, the individual workload, and how each component relates to other
components. You will typically begin your project by discovering the existing workloads in the
customer’s IT landscape.

The data collected from your customers IT landscape allows you to make better decisions
when choosing migration strategies. There are a number of tools you can use to complete the
discovery process. It’s also important to understand the business goals, stakeholders, and
impact to make an informed migration strategy decision.

Some questions to ask customers and application business owners when gathering data to
inform the right migration strategy for their environment include the following:

• Who owns or supports the application?

• Which business units does this application support?
• What is the relative importance (or criticality) of the application to the business?

After you have aligned the collected data for the organization’s business and technical
drivers, next is choosing the actual migration strategy.

When customers migrate to Amazon Web Services, or AWS, they choose strategies that best
fit the application being migrated. AWS provides seven common approaches, which include:
refactor, replatform, repurchase, rehost, relocate, retain, and retire. Because each application
is unique, enterprises often use multiple strategies for separate applications.

For example, you might recommend that your customer use a rehost strategy if they must
quickly migrate and scale to satisfy a business need. Or, you might recommend a refactor
strategy if your customer must add features, performance, or scale that would be a challenge
or difficult to achieve with their current application design.

Let’s walk through these seven strategies in more detail. After the explanation, I will show
you how these strategies can be applied with an example.

1. Starting with the relocation strategy. Relocate means to move applications or

workloads to the cloud with minimal downtime and without any change to your
existing operations or technical stack.

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AWS Partner: Accreditation (Technical)

• Why would you want to relocate in the first place? Let’s say you’re running
applications on VMware, and your data center lease is about to expire without
being renewed. A common use case for this migration scenario is to quickly
relocated to AWS using the infrastructure that’s most familiar to your
customer. A relocate strategy would be the fastest method to use in this type
of scenario.
2. A second commonly employed migration strategy is rehost, also known as “lift and
shift. In this approach, applications or workloads are migrated to AWS without any
changes to the underlying operating system or application stack. Customers can use
lift and shift strategy to quickly migrate, and then focus on application modernization.
After the application is in the cloud, it will be more convenient to get to a cloud-
optimized state.
3. A third migration strategy is to replatform, also called the lift, tinker, and shift. It’s like
changing an automobile engine out for one with higher performance, or adding newer
functionality. In practice, this could look like modernizing the database layer of your
customer’s application to a managed service. Which means spending less time on day-
to-day operations and more time focused on your business logic.
4. The next migration strategy is to repurchase applications. This means replacing your
existing application with a different version or product. This approach makes sense
when you are looking for a strategy that provides more business value than the
existing, on-premises application. Such benefits include accessibility from anywhere,
no infrastructure maintenance, and pay-as-you-go pricing models. Repurchasing the
application typically reduces costs associated with maintenance, infrastructure, and
licensing.
5. A fifth migration strategy is to refactor. This means re-designing application
architecture or rewriting an application before the migration to make it a cloud-native
application. Overall, it’s taking monolithic applications and breaking them down to
modular architecture, which is beneficial for adding new features, improving
performance, and scaling to meet your customers’ current resources.
6. The sixth migration strategy is to retire. This is useful if your customers discover that
an application is no longer necessary and can be decommissioned. After doing an
audit of on-premises applications, you may be surprised with how many applications
are up and running but simply are no longer needed or not being used!
7. The last migration strategy, is retain. Your customers can retain the application for
now, or revisit at a later date. This strategy is useful if some applications can’t be
immediately migrated due to licensing or other reasons. Retain could also be the
appropriate strategy if your customer recently invested in upgrading their current
system and you want to postpone migrating the application until the next refresh.
Examples include mainframe applications and databases, which need dedicated time
and effort investments.

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AWS Partner: Accreditation (Technical)

There are certain migration styles that fit different situations and needs. Just to re-
emphasize, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to migration. Here’s an example scenario
where a school district engaged an AWS Partner to improve performance and scalability of
their digital operations. This school district used a mix of migration strategies that included:
retire, repurchase, relocate, rehost, and refactor.

• In this scenario, the partner organized meetings with the application owners and
identified apps that were no longer needed or didn't have clear ownership. These
applications ended up being retired.
• The partner also worked with the school district to transition one of their applications
to a software as a service, or SaaS, model to reduce operational overheads. This effort
used a repurchase strategy.
• Another thing the partner did was move the school district’s containerized internal
applications to Amazon Elastic Container Service, or Amazon ECS, to scale their digital
systems more efficiently. This effort used a relocate strategy.
• In speaking with application owners, the partner uncovered that the school district
had already invested substantially in existing vendor licenses and support. They took a
rehost strategy for these applications, moving them as-is to Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud, or Amazon EC2, instances.
• Lastly, the partner suggested rewriting their multi-tiered applications as a modular
architecture to use EC2 scaling capabilities. Using a refactor strategy helped to
improve the performance and cost to operate these applications.

AWS Partners can help to accelerate the customer cloud journey by providing business
expertise, infrastructure and application migration expertise, migration tools, education, and
ongoing support to customers. For more information about migration strategies, check out
the resources provided after this video.

After you decide on the migration strategy, the next thing you should think about is how your
applications adhere to AWS best practices. I will introduce some helpful tips in the next
training topic.

See you in the next video!

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