Are you considering migrating your applications and databases to Amazon Web Services (AWS)? AWS offers a suite of migration services designed to make the process as smooth and efficient as possible. In this article, we’ll dive into the various AWS migration services, their features, and how they can assist you in migrating to the cloud.
1. AWS Application Discovery Service
The journey to the cloud begins with understanding your existing on-premises infrastructure. The AWS Application Discovery Service helps enterprise customers plan migration projects by collecting information about their on-premises data centers. It provides insights into the configuration, usage, and behavior of servers within your infrastructure. To use this service, you need to install and use the AWS Discovery Agent on your on-premises servers or virtual machines. These agents capture system configuration, system performance, running processes, and network connections between systems. In essence, this service allows you to discover the technical details of your applications, making it easier to plan and execute migrations.
2. AWS Data Migration Service (AWS DMS)
When it comes to migrating databases, AWS DMS is your go-to solution. This service enables you to migrate your databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime for applications relying on it. AWS DMS supports a wide range of commercial and open-source databases and can be used for continuous data replication with high availability. Additionally, you can use the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) for heterogeneous database migrations, allowing you to transform the schema of your source database to match your target database, whether it’s migrating from PostgreSQL to MySQL, Oracle to Amazon Aurora, or other transformations.
3. AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS)
For migrating on-premises workloads to AWS, AWS SMS provides a streamlined and agentless approach. You don’t need to install and set up an agent like other AWS services. Instead, you establish the connection to AWS using an SMS connector. By installing the SMS connector for each of your VMware vCenter environments, you can automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes. This makes it easier to coordinate large-scale server migrations, and you can do this without the need for extensive manual configuration.
4. AWS Migration Hub
Managing a migration project can be complex. AWS Migration Hub simplifies this process by providing a single place to discover existing servers, plan migrations, and track the status of each application migration. While this service doesn’t execute the actual data migration, it offers valuable visibility into your application portfolio and streamlines planning and tracking. Regardless of the migration tools you use, AWS Migration Hub allows you to see the status of servers and databases within each application you are migrating.
5. AWS Migration Evaluator
Making informed decisions is crucial in the cloud migration journey. AWS Migration Evaluator is a migration assessment service that helps businesses build a strong business case for AWS cloud planning and migration. By analyzing your current infrastructure, it recommends future state configurations to guide your migration strategy. The service creates a statistical model of compute patterns, revealing opportunities for cost savings by identifying over-provisioned resources and suggesting more efficient configurations.
In conclusion, AWS provides a comprehensive set of migration services to make your journey to the cloud as efficient and painless as possible. Understanding the unique capabilities of each service and how they align with your migration goals is key to a successful cloud migration project. Whether you’re assessing your current environment, migrating databases, or moving server workloads, AWS has you covered.
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