On the surface, migrating workloads to the public cloud may seem like a straightforward task, especially if you are already highly virtualized. However, if you’ve gone through the process of migrating applications to the public cloud, you know there is so much more under the surface, especially when it comes to upfront planning and analysis. What will your strategy be? Lift and shift? Lift and extend? Re-architect? Replace with SaaS? You need to consider what the impact may be on those using the application, what the downstream dependencies of the workload are… even things like your software licensing structure should be considered. The good news is that there are a slew of consulting and software companies that specialize in making your migration to the cloud easier. A lot easier. In fact, AWS even provides a list of approved Migration Competency Partners who can help with the various components of your migration.
Which brings me to some exciting news:
You might be thinking, huh? CloudHealth provides cost, usage, performance, and security management for the largest users of AWS in the world, how can they help with migration? One of our best kept secrets is the AWS Migration capabilities which determine the TCO of migrating specific applications to the cloud.
How does it work? I’m glad you asked! Here are the four steps that will lead you to the TCO of hosting specific applications in AWS:
- Deploy a lightweight agent to servers running in one or more data centers. Let the agent run for at least a few days so CloudHealth can collect and analyze performance and usage data for modeling infrastructure.
- OPTIONAL: Deploy AWS Application Discovery Service agents in order to understand application dependencies and map assets by function.
- Run the CloudHealth Migration Assessment, adjusting variables such as location, headroom required across CPU, memory, and disk. Decide if you want to use burstable workloads.
- RESULT: Using the collected data and analysis, CloudHealth will make “rightsized” recommendations for what infrastructure types you should migrate to in AWS. CloudHealth will also tell you which Reserved Instances you should buy, and what the workload will cost to run in AWS.
Not too bad, right? There are still lots of other decisions and plans to be made, but you now have a number of critical pieces of information that will help guide your migration planning.
Learn more about how CloudHealth can help you with your migration initiatives.
