This is a known fact that most of the migrations happen in phases to minimize risk and speed up time to production. The approach in which applications are migrated “as is” or with very minimum changes is called lift-and-shift. This approach ensures fastest go live to production on cloud among all other approaches.
Often originations got in deception of buzz words like Microservices and serverless and wanted to go all in while choosing migration approaches. They desired to get rid of their legacy datacentres ASAP to avoid renewal and making long term commitment, but at the same time they also seek to modernise their application and developing new architecture at the time of migration.
Every so often I recommend lift n shift, because once you are on cloud it is easier to modernize and re-architect application elements, leveraging cloud benefits of cloud i.e scalability, reliability, lesser time to procure and provision etc.
In this blog I will show how application migration will be carried out quickly, cost-effectively. To migrate application to AWS we will leverage AWS newly launched service AWS Application Migration Service (also known as AWS MGN) which is based on AWS lift and shift strategy.
Reference architecture
As shown in above image below are the steps involved in migrating workloads to AWS cloud using AWS MGN.
Launch hosting environment Create VPC. Create Staging and Production subnets Create Internet gateway and attach it to the target VPC Create Route tables, Launch an instance as a Bastion host in the Migrated Resources Public Subnet Create security group, and add rules Setup network connectivity to and from your on-premises environment and within your Amazon VPC. Create IAM user for AWS Replication Agent Create the Replication Settings template in the AWS MGN Console Install the AWS Replication Agents on source servers Configure the Launch Settings in the AWS MGN console Launch the test instances Launch the cutover instances Finalize cutover
With above steps we can migrate an on premise application from on-premises to AWS using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN). Once we have a running application on AWS cloud our next phase can be introducing auto scaling, load balancing, S3 for content storage, adopting CI/CD, AWS RDS, Microservrices, Serverless and other native services to build a complete modernised environment.
Benefits
Save Time- AWS MGN is highly automated lift-and-shift (rehost) solution that simplifies, expedites, and reduces the cost of migrating applications to AWS
Reduce Cost- Migrating to cloud with VM’s rightsizing
Modernise effectively – With cloud native services like Lambda, Fargate, ECS, and Codepipleine etc. developer can innovate effectively, while there legacy application will run parallel with solution that is scalable, reliable and cost effective.
