If you’re preparing for a Cloud migration, or even just considering making the move from on-premises to Cloud, we’ve got just the thing for you in this article.
We’ll share our proven top tips and best practice to help you develop your AWS Cloud migration strategy for a smooth and successful experience.
You’ll learn:
- How to identify your core priorities
- Practical tips to optimise your design
- Things to consider around your hardware and Cloud techstack
- Skilling up your team
- Guidance around planning
- And more…
Ready to discover how you can maintain focus, optimise your design and lay the foundations for success? Let’s begin.
How to develop your AWS Cloud migration strategy in 5 key steps
1. Determine your North Star
It’s crucial that you prioritise your list of requirements and identify your ultimate ‘North Star’. This is your primary goal, and should be the core focus of your migration. Any design, prototyping or testing, should put this at the forefront.
For example, if your migration North Star is improved performance – providing the fastest, smoothest experience for your users on release day – you may prefer to host your techstack within a single geographical area (AWS – Availability Zone), on a small number of large servers, to optimise latency.
On the other hand, if your North Star is higher resiliency within your solution – let’s say your applications are mission-critical, and any downtime has a significant impact on the organisation – then ensuring that network or hardware failures can be tolerated may be preferable. You might choose to deploy the applications in clusters across geographical locations. Whilst this choice potentially decreases performance somewhat, it can result in a more robust solution.
All solutions have their trade-offs, but these compromises are easier to navigate with a clear North Star in mind.
Whether you’re looking to move your on-premises Server or Data Center stack into the Atlassian Cloud SaaS offering, or migrate into AWS, Azure or GCP, trust us to guide you through the process.
2. Optimise the design
Now you’ve determined your North Star – that principle ‘why’ behind your AWS migration (alongside the various additional benefits) – let’s bring you a few top tips we’ve developed through our extensive Cloud migration experience.
Start small
When beginning the solution design phase, it can be tempting to create the world’s greatest, industry leading solution and go from there. Believe us – this is likely a mistake. At the onset, think optimal, not perfect. To do this, you could:
Perform an analysis of your existing solutions and take estimates based on those configurations.
Consider expansion over time.
Consider how the solution may need to remediate any existing concerns or pain points.
3. Review your hardware age and specs
During the comparison of your on-premises and Cloud hardware, consider not just the general specifications, but the age of the hardware being used.
An Intel desktop processor from five years ago will almost certainly perform worse than the latest AMD Server CPUs deployed in AWS Cloud, regardless of matching core counts and clock speeds.
4. Leverage the power of a Cloud techstack
The majority of your on-premises software is likely a collection of unrelated tools, from a variety of vendors, integrated together to encompass your technology stack.
Now, in contrast, consider the plethora of AWS SaaS offerings and how they could streamline your solution. Services like RDS and Aurora enable simplified Database deployment. S3 is a cost-effective alternative for mass and long-term storage.
Look at the migration process itself, meanwhile, and you’ll find that much of the complexity can be abstracted away by using tools such as AWS Datasync.
👁️🗨️ Don’t take our word for it!
Review AWS’s detailed white papers and online documentation and discover if any services may be able to replace your existing software, and allow for easier management and maintenance.
5. Reskill and upskill
Compared to setting up an on-premises solution, with configuration files, server/network firewalls, privileged user management and general software installation, Cloud platforms are a breeze. (Well, to us they are). The majority of solution development and maintenance can be carried out within the AWS console.
However, your migration taskforce will still need knowledge of Cloud concepts.
For starters, we’d recommend AWS‘ in-depth explanations via their online knowledge base, whilst for the teams working closely with infrastructure, AWS provides a whole host of certifications tailored to varying job roles (Solutions Architect, Develop, Administrator etc.) and levels of understanding (e.g. Beginner, Professional).
When performing a migration into the Cloud, it’s important to consider every aspect of change (so your hardware, software, configuration, and so on), and to think about how these changes will be supported by skilled teams in the future.
Plan, plan, plan (…and then plan some more)
Now comes the time to transition to your Cloud environment in a safe, repeatable way – one which ensures organisational confidence in a successful transformation. How do you do it?
The answer lies in planning.
Trial migration
💡 Tip!
If lower environments don’t exist within your organisation, inspect any connections between tools in detail, ensuring that the required changes during any trial migration are documented.
We’ve highlighted this point before, but it’s worth reiterating: To ensure that the solution is fit for purpose, in-depth testing is mandatory.
You’ll need to consider varying aspects of testing. Depending on your North Star, these may be of higher or lower priority. Some examples to consider include Performance, Regression, Integration, Load, and Security.
Discover how we optimised AWS performance, saving our client significant costs and reducing technical debt, in this case study for a major telecoms provider. Read the full story here!
Production migration
Once the solution is finalised, there is one last thing to plan: The production migration itself.
By this point, the infrastructure should be deployed, support teams should be up to speed with required knowledge and skills, and robust testing should have ironed out any issues.
It’s important to consider the impact of the migration itself on your user base. When will the migration be carried out? Over a weekend reduces user impact, but it also requires out-of-hours teams to carry out the migration, perform smoke-testing, and provide a final ‘Go’ decision. All of this can prove expensive. On the other hand, a migration within working hours can significantly impact productivity.
The time it takes to perform the migration itself may be the deciding factor. Consider the data transfer time: This can be proportional to the number of files to be transferred, or the total size of the data (e.g. many small files vs. few large files). Do note that this can only be estimated via testing, such as during the trial migration.
Whichever approach you choose, it’s essential that the migration is perceived as a successful transformation within the business. In short, reduced performance on Day One is unacceptable. Yet again, this brings us back to testing! Ensure that any performance testing is robust and thorough, with plenty of time left before the migration must be completed.
Access
Finally, ensure user access has been planned. We mean both the removal of access (so changes to the systems during migration are not lost) and re-instantiation (so users are back online as soon as possible).
Are you ready for your AWS Cloud migration?
As an Atlassian Platinum Solution partner and AWS Select Partner, with extensive Cloud platform experience and an Atlassian Cloud Specialization, AC is ideally placed to support you.
Why not book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your needs with us? From your challenges to your objectives, we can provide free, fair and pragmatic recommendations during the session, and may get your AWS Cloud migration off the ground.
The future is Cloud – and we’re here to help you harness its power and potential.
