The concept of migration
Our goal is to introduce the concept of migration, and also introduce some of the concepts and preliminary resources that you might find helpful as you continue to learn about migrating to AWS. One of the topics from this week is the AWS shared responsibility model for security. The shared responsibility model describes a relationship where AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, and you, as the customer, is responsible for the security in the cloud. You also learned about a couple of approaches to migration that you can consider. One approach relates to the type of migration that you might be planning. Those types, which are laid out in the 7 Rs of migration, help you keep in mind the style of migration that you might need for your various applications. The second approach is the three-phase migration process: assess, mobilize, and migrate and modernize. This three-phase migration process was designed by AWS to help you approach your migration. Closing this section, you learned about the AWS Prescriptive Guidance page. On this page, you can find strategies, guides, and patterns to help accelerate your cloud migration. These resources were developed by AWS technology experts and the global community of AWS Partners.
The assess phase of the migration process
You learned about several services and tools that are crucial to a migration to AWS. These services and tools included the Migration Readiness Assessment, which includes dozens of questions for your team. These questions can help get everyone to a common place on how to view, plan, and perform your necessary migrations. You also learned about two primary services during this time. The first service is the AWS Migration Evaluator. You can use this service to work directly with the Migration Evaluator team to create a directional business case and provide additional insights for your migrations. The team will capture your objectives, and then use analytics to narrow down to the migration patterns that are best suited to your business needs. Also, keep in mind that you can browse through example data to get a better idea of what the Migration Evaluator can do for your organization. The other service that you learned about is the AWS Migration Hub. Migration Hub is one of the best resources you can have to help accelerate and simplify your migration to AWS. You can use Migration Hub to help make the case for cloud within your organization, create an inventory of assets, track your applications, and more. And though we introduced Migration Hub this week, you will continue to learn about it throughout the remainder of the course.
Reevaluating of migration plan based on the data
As part of your time with the mobilize phase of the migration process, you learned about reevaluating of migration plan based on the data that you obtain through the assess phase. You also moved another step closer to finalizing the plans for migrating your applications. One of the services that we discuss is AWS Application Discovery Service, which can help you plan the migration of your various applications. You can use Application Discovery Service to view server utilization; map resource dependencies; and collect behavior, usage, and configuration data from your servers. If you would like to view and work with the commands used to install the AWS Application Discovery Service Agent (Discovery Agent) during the demo, learning about the commands could help you better understand the service, how it operates, and how you might be able to use it. Additionally, as you move closer to starting your actual migrations, you learned about two helpful tools that you can use to prepare your environments within AWS. The first tool is AWS Landing Zone, which can help you save time by automating the setup of an environment by creating core accounts and resources. It also provides a baseline environment to help you get started with a multi-account architecture, identity and access management, governance, and more. AWS Control Tower is the other tool that you can use for this stage of preparation. AWS Control Tower provides a way to set up and govern secure, multi-account AWS environments, which are called landing zones. By using AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower helps to bring ongoing account management and governance, and also the implementation of best practices based on AWS experience. Speaking of governance, it’s very important for you to use the available tools to help make your environments secure and compliant as you migrate. AWS Management and Governance offers many tools that can help with management and governance before and during your migration, and also with your ongoing usage and optimizations in AWS.
Tools
During the migrate and modernize section, you mostly learned about tools that can primarily help you with the migration of your data. One of the first introduced was the AWS Database Migration Service, which helps to migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The service also keeps the source database operational during the migration, helping to minimize downtime and impact to resources dependent on the databases. From there, you learned about four services that help to manage and move data between AWS and your on-premises environments. The first service that you learned about is AWS DataSync, which is a secure service that automates moving data between locations. DataSync can copy data between various storage systems and types, and AWS. The second service that you learned about is AWS Storage Gateway, a hybrid cloud storage service that gives on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. Storage Gateway provides a standard set of storage protocols, the use of AWS storage without needing to rewrite your existing applications, and a suite of gateway types for you to use (depending on your needs). Another service in this realm is AWS Direct Connect. Direct Connect links your internal network to an AWS Direct Connect location over a standard Ethernet fiber-optic cable, which connects your router to a Direct Connect router. By using Direct Connect, you can interface directly with public AWS services or to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) — and thus bypass internet service providers in your network path. The fourth service suite is the AWS Snow Family, which includes AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile. All AWS Snow Family services are helpful if you need to quickly move large amounts of data to AWS, and they also provide options for preprocessing the data before it’s migrated. The Snowcone and Snowball devices were shown directly in the videos, and Snowmobile is also an option if you need to move petabytes of data as quickly as possible. To close out our migration course, we wanted to make sure that you learned about another tool that can help you as you continue to develop your AWS skills. AWS Skill Builder is a great location where you can find hundreds of hours of no-charge content, and links to various training and certification resources.
