Though Cloud services are relatively a new dimension of the digital space, they have already transformed business architectures across industries by penetrating deep into their operations and maintenance. The extent of this explosion can be grasped from the fact that you can’t possibly name one successful enterprise, either large or small, that doesn’t employ cloud services in any way.
And while there is a wide range of cloud services available in the market, the first that comes to mind is Amazon Web Services (AWS), partly because it was the first of its kind that virtually created the cloud services industry as we know it and partly because it is unarguably the best. But since AWS offers dozens of cloud-based solutions, we will here discuss only a part of it- Migration, something which is most relevant for businesses who are looking to get started with cloud.
AWS Migration Strategies
Migration, to put it simply, is the process of transferring your on-premises workloads to Amazon Cloud. These workloads can be applications, servers, database or any component you use for your business operation. Keeping in mind that each business has different architecture and business needs, AWS offers different migration strategies of which three are as follows:
- Application Discovery Service
This service collects and analyzes the existing configuration, usage, and data behavior of your servers that can be later used to precisely estimate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of running on AWS and plan the migration accordingly.
- Server Migration Service
The Server Migration Service allows you to automate, schedule and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier for you to coordinate large-scale server migrations.
- Database Migration Service
The AWS Database Migration Service is compatible with and can migrate your data to and from almost every widely-used database. During the migration, the source database remains fully operational, hence, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. This service supports all kinds of migrations including homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL.
Benefits of Migrating to Cloud
- Cost- Maintaining on-premise data centers and servers is not a low-priced task and drains plenty of resources. From hiring professionals to manage such infrastructure to constant upgrades, there are a lot of cost overheads to keeping private servers and data centers. But when you deploy such workloads to the cloud, you only have to pay for the resources you actually use, no extra overheads.
- Almost zero-downtime- Managing such complex infrastructure is a tricky business, and those relying on private servers can testify that a connection loss or server crashing happens more often than not, thus, resulting in huge productivity and monetary loss. But with state-of-the-art clouds, such instances are almost unimaginable and they often guarantee somewhere like 99.95% uptime.
- Security- Cyber attacks are one of the most common concerns businesses face these days, and no matter how expert professionals they hire, they can’t possibly match the industry-leading security professionals and technologies that Amazon deploys on its clouds to keep your data secure.
- Scalability- Unlike large enterprises that struggle to manage their existing workloads, startups face an entirely different problem- how much infrastructure to deploy? If too little, the operations will suffer. If more than required, its sheer wastage of limited resources. The only feasible solution to this problem is to migrate to AWS that easily scales according to usage. One can start with a mere storage allocation of few Gigabytes and scale up to Petabytes.
Apart from the above-described reasons, the most prominent one perhaps is that there is virtually no reason to not migrate to AWS!
Looking for migrate to AWS? Let’s connect with experienced web developers that can offer cloud-based solutions.
