Content Domain 1: Cloud Concepts

Task Statement 1.3: Understand the benefits of and strategies for migration to the AWS Cloud

Let's get started with the third task statement which is to understand the benefits of and strategies for migration to AWS. For this task statement, ensure you know how to use AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and which resources can help support your migration journey to AWS. In our last lesson, we talked about the AWS Well-Architected Framework which is different from the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework. The AWS CAF provides a comprehensive approach to cloud and it identifies specific organizational capabilities for successful cloud transformations. These capabilities provide best practice guidance and help you improve your cloud readiness. These capabilities are grouped into six perspectives, business, people, governance, platforms, security, and operations. Ensure you know how to use the AWS CAF to identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve your cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve your transformation roadmap. What are the benefits of using AWS CAF? Well, you can reduce the business risk through improved reliability, increase performance, and enhance security. You can increase your operational efficiency by reducing costs and increasing productivity. You can grow by creating new products and services to reach new customers or new markets. And you can improve performance by improving your sustainability and transparency. What are some cloud adoption strategies? Well, when organizations start migrating to AWS, they could be in different stages of adoption. The project stage is when you are evaluating if migrating to AWS would meet your specific requirements and needs. The foundation stage is when the migration to AWS begins. Maybe you move a few production applications to AWS or deploy an initial framework for the landing zone to a non-production environment. The migration stage is where you define roles for cloud operations, establish a cloud center of excellence, also known as a CCOE, and prepare for long-term cloud operations instead of on-premises operations. Last is the reinvention stage where all new projects start in AWS. An assessment of where you and your organization sits is completed to understand which stage of adoption you are at before the migration begins. For the exam, ensure you know how to identify appropriate migration strategies, such as database replication, using the AWS database migration service, or AWS Snowball. We will talk about these more in depth in a later lesson. Before the exam, know the seven migration strategies. Retire is for applications you want to decommission or retire. Retain is for applications that you want to keep in the source environment or applications that are not ready to migrate. Rehost, also known as lift and shift are for applications to migrate without making any changes to the application. Relocate is for a large number of servers that are made up of one or more applications. Repurchase is also known as drop and shop and is for applications with a different version or product and provides more value than the existing infrastructure. Replatform is also known as lift, tinker, and shift and is for applications that need some level of optimization in order to operate efficiently or take advantage of AWS capabilities. Refactor or re-architect is for applications that you want to migrate to AWS and take full advantage of the cloud-native features to improve agility, performance, and scalability. What are some other AWS services and resources that are available to support your cloud migration journey? Let's say that you're migrating your application that stores financial information to AWS. Your application requires low latency access and the data is constantly changing. Which AWS service could you use for this application migration? Amazon Elastic File System, AWS Snowball Edge, Amazon Simple Storage Service, or Amazon Relational Database Service? Well, Amazon S3 is always a good choice, but for the low latency requirement, Amazon S3 is not the best choice because Amazon S3 sits in the public zone and it is located outside of your Amazon VPC it could have more latency. AWS Snowball Edge is used for migration when you need to move large amounts of data into or out of AWS. My choices would be Amazon EFS and Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS is a managed database service that provides a scalable relational database with fast performance, high availability, and security. Amazon EFS provides scalable file storage with Amazon EC2 instances, and the storage capacity is elastic too. What if you're migrating a NoSQL database and you must ensure the database is scalable, fast, and reliable? What AWS database service would you choose? Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon DynamoDB? Well, DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with scalability. NoSQL and non-relational are keywords for DynamoDB just as relational is a keyword for Amazon RDS. Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database and stores JSON-type documents. AWS has another fully managed relational database service, Amazon Aurora. What if you need to launch a Microsoft SQL Server database in AWS but you need to ensure the database is cost optimized and only a standard license for SQL server is required. Do you launch an Amazon Aurora database that runs SQL server and buy a standard Microsoft SQL server license from the AWS License Manager service? Or do you use an RDS instance that runs SQL server with a standard SQL license? Or do you launch an Amazon EC2 instance and install SQL server and purchase a standard SQL license from Microsoft? Or do you use a Windows server with SQL Server Standard AMI so you do not need to buy or manage your own license? Well, AWS offers multiple Amazon Machine Images or AMIs for Amazon EC2 instances. If you launch an Amazon EC2 instance using a Windows AMI, you can choose one bundled with SQL Server Standard, and you do not need to purchase your own license from Microsoft. You could possibly choose the Amazon RDS database instance that runs SQL Server Standard and purchase the license, but the question asked for cost optimization and Amazon RDS costs more than Amazon EC2 because Amazon RDS is a managed service. Also, Amazon Aurora only supports MySQL and PostgresSQL, not SQL Server. Another area of focus for this task statement is data backups because you need a plan in place to store your data once migrated. Ensure you understand the cost storage options for the AWS storage services. For example, Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are designed to be the lowest-cost Amazon S3 storage classes allowing you to archive large amounts of data at a very low cost. But you do have to consider the retrieval fees and the retrieval times. Let's get started with the fourth task statement and talk about cloud economics.