The AWS cloud is a great place to run your applications, but moving existing applications from on-premises hardware to the cloud can be tricky. Fortunately, Amazon Web Services provides many tools to help you migrate your existing applications and databases to AWS.
The migration process depends on your application type and your tools. You may need to adjust some application settings or rewrite some scripts before moving them to the cloud. For example, if your application uses Microsoft SQL Server databases, you’ll need to update those scripts to work with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
In this article, we’ll look at migrating your existing applications to the AWS cloud from on-premises hardware to AWS using some common tools:
First, you need to understand how much you’re using on-premise and how much you can move to the cloud without overloading your bandwidth or affecting the performance of your applications.
A widespread use case for AWS is migrating existing applications from on-premises servers to the cloud. This requires careful planning and consideration of several factors.
You need to consider whether or not your application can be migrated. Some applications have dependencies on specific hardware configurations, so they may not be able to run on AWS instances at all. For example, if you’re running an application that uses OpenSSL, you’ll need to ensure that it runs on an instance with the necessary libraries.
Consider the cost of staying on-premises
When your application is already running on-premises, the decision to migrate to the cloud can be more complex than it may seem at first. The cost of migrating your application to the cloud may be high, but it may not be as expensive as you think. The costs associated with going from an on-premises environment to a public cloud are divided into two categories:
- Infrastructure: This includes servers, networking equipment, storage devices, and other related hardware.
- Operations: This includes labor costs for managing and maintaining the environment.
Fortunately, there are some ways to make the migration process straightforward and less expensive.
Lift and shift your workloads
Lift and shift is one easy way to migrate your existing application to the AWS cloud. It involves moving your application from an on-premises or co-located environment to Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS cloud. The process involves copying all the files, data, configuration, and other resources from your existing environment and placing them into Amazon EC2 instances.
Lift and shift is when you want to move an application or workload without changing its functionality.
For example, if you’re upgrading an application that uses a relational database, you may want to consider using Amazon Aurora or other NoSQL databases instead.
You can also use the Server Migration Service to migrate your servers from VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V into AWS. This service provides intelligent migration tools that allow you to move virtual machines between on-premises environments and AWS without downtime for migrating workloads. In addition, the service integrates with Azure Site Recovery for hybrid deployments between AWS and Azure.
Use the AWS Hybrid Cloud Toolkit
The AWS Hybrid Cloud Toolkit is a collection of scripts that helps you migrate your existing applications to the AWS Cloud. The toolkit automates many steps in migrating an application from on-premises to the cloud and provides a simple interface for managing the migration process.
The toolkit supports two types of migrations:
- Migrations from a physical server or VPC to a virtual private cloud (VPC) using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This type of migration is useful when you have an existing application running on a physical server or VPC, but you want to migrate it to AWS. This is “lift-and-shift” migrations because they don’t require any changes to your application code.
- Migrations from one or more EC2 instances running Amazon Linux or Ubuntu into a VPC using AMIs already configured with all the necessary components (e.g., applications, libraries, and configuration files). This type of migration is for when you want to replace an existing on-premises application with an equivalent AWS service such as Elastic Beanstalk or Auto Scaling Groups.
Create a DR plan first, then migrate to AWS
Planning for disaster recovery (DR) is essential in modernizing your application architecture.
Before migrating your applications to the AWS Cloud, you should create a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan. This allows you to test and validate that your applications can run on the cloud before migration and helps you understand how much time it will take to recover from an unexpected outage.
Reverse DNS lookup is required for ingress DNS resolution
If you migrate from on-premises infrastructure to AWS, you must configure your DNS to resolve to the virtual private cloud (VPC) IP address ranges. You can do this by configuring a reverse DNS lookup zone for the VPC and associating it with your public or private subnet.
When you configure DNS for your Amazon VPC, there are two things that you must do:
- Register the instances with their public IP addresses in Route 53. This makes sure that when an instance receives traffic on its public IP address, it is routed to the right instance.
- Configure a reverse DNS lookup zone (also known as an A record) in Route 53 that associates each public IP address with an instance ID. This association allows users who want to connect directly to an instance to find its public IP address from its private IP address.
Conclusion
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel when migrating your existing applications to the AWS cloud. Plenty of tools like CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk can help you do it, rather than spending countless hours deciphering how-to yourself. This article has shown how to migrate your existing applications to the AWS cloud to save you time.
