Welcome to the world of AWS cloud
Making the jump to cloud can be daunting and rife with uncertainties. Those who have turned that leap into a confident stride are reaping the rewards. The migration of business capabilities to the cloud is an instinctive move for some, but not all. Hesitant? Then let us explore the cornucopia of opportunities available once migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is complete.
The bright stuff
Amazon Web Services cloud helps businesses bring new apps, services and products to market quicker than ever before. The cloud ethos, blending a flexible but structured approach, encourages business leaders to think outside the box to explore opportunities unreachable before.
Because businesses only pay for what they use with AWS, the cost per unit is wholly predictable. Predictable costs allow for keen prices, meaning better sales. The services scale elastically and can easily accommodate sales peaks or the addition of sales incentives.
Cycles everywhere
Microservices architectures, containerised workloads and other technologies stimulate continuous development. Small changes may be made and cool new features added to existing products without the need to drop an entire application or service, ensuring constant and consistent availability to end customers.
As a wider community, we are becoming more tech-savvy with every passing year, and we demand self-service availability when we want it. Proactively maintained apps are not just inherently more secure, but popular; regular updates to digital services give customers confidence in using them as well as a reason to re-engage.
Check the list below for more modern architecture AWS services we recommend when migrating.
1. AWS Lambda: a serverless computing service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers.
2. Amazon API Gateway: a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs at any scale.
3. Amazon S3: a highly scalable and durable object storage service that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
4. Amazon DynamoDB: a fast and flexible NoSQL database service that provides consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
5. Amazon SQS: a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems and serverless applications.
6. Amazon SNS: a fully managed pub/sub messaging service enabling you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems and serverless applications.
Other relevant AWS microservices include Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon RDS and many more. It’s important to evaluate your application requirements and choose the most appropriate microservices to meet your needs.
Pals don’t let pals miss out on valuable business opportunities
As a cloud-native platform, Amazon Web Services naturally connects via API gateway to services provided by business or brand partners. Embedding a business partner’s products in your own sales process not only adds value for your customer but might also earn you a valuable commission. For example, a pet store could add the ability for their customers to purchase pet insurance at checkout, or a coffee shop might offer customers the choice to spend reward points at an online music streaming service – the possibilities are endless.
Fluent migrations using AWS Migration Service
Migrating on-premises workloads to AWS can be done efficiently and faster using the migration services provided by AWS. The migration cost optimisation, combined with reduced application downtime, enables customers to seamlessly migrate to AWS.
AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is successfully used to migrate server and application workloads together with all dependencies to AWS. For large migrations that are done in multiple phases, AWS Migration Hub allows customers to track the progress.
There are several steps that need to be followed to migrate workloads to AWS:
1. Install the AWS Replication Agent on the source server. It can be installed on both Linux and Windows servers.
2. Wait until the initial sync is finished.
3. Launch test instances.
4. Perform acceptance tests on the servers. After the test instance is tested successfully, finalise the test and delete the test instance.
5. Wait for the cutover window.
6. Confirm that there is no lag.
7. Stop all operational services on the source server.
8. Launch a cutover instance.
9. Confirm that the cutover instance was launched successfully and then finalise the cutover.
AWS Application Migration Service enables fast and easy migration of workloads to AWS. It can be used to migrate applications such as SAP, Oracle and SQL Server running on physical servers, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and other on-premises infrastructure.
Decommission mission
It can be hard to let go sometimes, but decommissioning legacy server rooms substantially reduces energy bills, eliminates maintenance costs and saves office space. Many businesses are currently dispensing with much of their office accommodation partly or entirely, choosing distributed working models. These savings add up and should be spent to sharpen your competitive edge.
James Ayling, Principal Consultant at Endava, notes how working models are adapting to the increasing pace of technological innovation: “These days, we provide our innovative minds with a secure PC and an offer of assistance should they need it. That means no drain on senior decision-makers, little to no commitment to ongoing costs and the freedom to progress ideas into a working prototype. Not all of them will be a success of course, but when you can start testing them almost immediately for the price of a few pints, it really unlocks the potential of your people.”
It’s the real world but not as we know it
Imagine a complex enterprise system application which manages a just-in-time sales and fulfilment process. Making changes, even the smallest tweak, is fraught with danger. Disruptions would have a severe impact on sales and severely disappoint customers, who might look elsewhere in the future. AWS IoT Twinmaker creates a digital doppelgänger of physical systems, allowing us to examine the digital ‘twin’ in an immersive three-dimensional representation or test potential changes before applying them safely in the real world. These explorations lead to new vital insights and innovations that might have been inconceivable without access to the digital twin.
Everything, everywhere
The world, seen from the perspective of the AWS cloud, is an extensive network of data points. The flood sensor in a factory basement, the video stream from a smart home camera and the health data from a smartwatch are all part of the Internet of Things.
Data-driven solutions are pushing the next wave in the societal adoption of data lifestyles, from proactive healthcare to driverless vehicles. As consumers increasingly accept digital solutions, the services they demand are in turn increasingly digital, connected and interconnected. Those businesses that rise to meet the demand for digital solutions will gain that crucial edge over their competitors.
Sethu Lankala, Senior Developer at Endava, views data ubiquity as an emergent property: “Every company is, or will eventually become, a data company. Great software is based on high-quality data – it ingests, processes and visualises the data all in one place.”
Future-perfect
The future is digital, online and in the cloud. From virtual reality to smart homes, from autonomous vehicles to artificial intelligence, from the metaverse to quantum computing, the technologies and trends we’re moving towards worldwide are inherently cloud-based. Those prepared to embrace digital realms, to meet future innovation head-on, will be those who succeed.
More modern architecture AWS services we recommend adopting when migrating:
- AWS Lambda: a serverless computing service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers.
- Amazon API Gateway: a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure APIs at any scale.
- Amazon S3: a highly scalable and durable object storage service that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
- Amazon DynamoDB: a fast and flexible NoSQL database service that provides consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
- Amazon SQS: a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems and serverless applications.
- Amazon SNS: a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems and serverless applications.
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service for Docker containers on AWS.
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): a fully managed Kubernetes service that makes it easy to deploy, manage and scale containerised applications using Kubernetes on AWS.
- AWS Fargate: a serverless compute engine for containers that allows developers to run containers without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR): a fully managed Docker container registry that makes it easy to store, manage and deploy Docker container images.
- Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights: a monitoring and observability service that provides container-level visibility into the performance and health of your applications.
So, get ready to jump, and we’ll be happy to support you as your partner! In the previous two parts of our ‘Journey to the Centre of the Cloud with AWS’ series, we looked into the reasons for migrating to AWS cloud and explored the details of the AWS cloud migration.