Migration and Transfer

AWS Migration Hub assists in planning the migration activities to the AWS cloud.

It helps to discover details of the on-premise environment, either through agent-based or agent-less discovery strategies.

It generates a list of servers, CPU, Memory and Network utilization. It provides recommendations of target EC2 instances and the associated cost.

AWS Application Discovery Service helps gather necessary information of your on-premise applications and infrastructure.
It helps identify relationships and dependencies between servers.
The data is pushed from agents to ADS every 15 minutes.

AWS Application Migration Service performs the lift and shift of on-premise VMs to the cloud.
AWS has a staging area and a migrated resources area.

A Replication agent needs to be installed on the on-premise servers.

It integrates with AWS Systems Manager, S3 and Elastic Disaster Recovery.

It provides a continuous replication from on-prem to the staging area. Staging can be periodically moved to production.

AWS Database Migration Service helps to migrate databases from on-premise to cloud.

DMS Fleet Advisor provides insight into the database.

A Replication Instance helps to replicate the data.

A Replication Task defines how the replication should occur.

You must create an EC2 instance that will handle the migration task.

Migration could be homogenous (e.g. Oracle → Oracle) or heterogeneous (e.g. mongoDB → DocumentDB)

Use Case:
RDS MySQL → Aurora
Option 1: DB Snapshots from RDS MySQL are restored as MySQL Aurora DB
Option 2: Create a Aurora Read Replica from your RDS MySQL and when replication lag is 0, promote it as its own DB cluster (can take time and $$)

Use Case:
External MySQL → Aurora
Option 1: Use Percona XtraBackup to create a file backup in S3. Create Aurora MySQL DB from Amazon S3
Option 2: Create an Aurora MySQL DB. Use the mysqldump utility to migrate MySQL into Aurora - slower than S3

Use DMS if both databases are up and running.

Use Case:
RDS PostgreSQL→ Aurora
Option 1: DB Snapshots from RDS PostgreSQL restored as MySQL Aurora DB
Option 2: Create an Aurora Read Replica from your RDS PostgreSQL and when replication lag is 0, promote it as its own DB cluster (can take time and $$)

Use Case:
External PostgreSQL→ Aurora
Create a backup and put it in Amazon S3. Import it using the aws_s3 Aurora extension.

Use DMS if both databases are up and running

To manage a disaster recovery site on-premise could be a costly affair.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery service is a fully managed disaster recovery service for physical, virtual and cloud based servers.

The below terminology is important for managing DR:

An AWS Replication Agent needs to be installed on any source server that needs to be backed up.
Staging area is the location where AWS receives the data.
A Launch template is used to configure the specifications of the recovery servers.

Elastic Disaster Recovery can minimize downtime and data loss with reliable recovery.

On the Cloud we have:

S3 can be used for Disaster Recovery and it offers 11 9s of data durability.

EBS Snapshots can be used for DR. The snapshots are incremental.

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that centrally manages and automates backups across AWS services.

Backup Vault stores your data.
Backup Plan defines the configuration for backup.
Recovery Point is the point of time that data can be restored.
AWS Backup Vault Lock enforces the WORM model i.e. Write Once Read Many.

Backups cannot be deleted even by the root user.

AWS Mainframe Modernization moves mainframes present on-premise to the cloud and changes the runtime to a modern system.

Supports Refactoring and Re-platforming.

AWS DataSync helps to move large amount of data to and from AWS.

Components include:
Agent: to be installed on the source
Location: defines the source and destination
Task: describes the transfer (blueprint)
Task Execution: actual execution of a task

A Task could be in one of the following states:

A Task Execution could be in one of the following states:

A DataSync agent connects to the on-premise data center and sends the data to the DataSync Discovery service so that it can provide the ideal recommendations for your setup.

AWS Transfer Family is a secure transfer service that enables you to transfer files in and out of AWS storage services.

It works with S3 and EFS.

Transfer Family Server is a fully managed and highly available FTP server where files can be hosted.

It supports the following protocols:

We can implement AWS Transfer Family with automated lifecycle policies to transition older data to more cost-effective storage classes.

AWS Snow Family consists of a set of physical hardware devices that facilitate copying data to and from AWS.

They are rugged, portable and highly secure.

They are recommended when it takes more than 1 week to transfer data on the network.

Apart from migrating data, some devices can collect and process data at the edge.

The following devices support Data Migration:

Snowcone Snowball Edge Snowmobile

The following devices support Edge computing:

Snowcone Snowball Edge

Edge computing is processing data while its being created on an edge location. Edge locations have limited or no internet access.
They can run EC2 Instances and AWS Lambda Functions.

AWS OpsHub is a CLI to manage your Snow Family Device.