Migrating to the cloud can be the greatest business transformation tool of our time, capable of turning an unrealistic or impractical goal into an achievable reality. But doing this right requires a carefully fleshed out strategy, backed by diligent analysis and planning.
In this post, we discuss how Mission, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner,
drives effective and efficient migration to the cloud by leveraging two amazing platforms that are now part of AWS - TSO Logic and CloudEndure.
TSO Logic is a service offering that helps customers prepare for their cloud migration journey. Specifically, TSO Logic helps with the following:
TSO Logic analyzed 104,283 on-premise OS instances deployed across 20 companies (see this link).
One of the key findings of this analysis was that if you directly moved all your on-premise workloads to AWS, you will see an approximately 20% increase in cost. However, if you take the time to rightsize your AWS workloads, you can see approximately 36% reduction in costs just in infrastructure alone.
Similarly, good license planning can also have a huge impact on your cost savings:
AWS CloudEndure helps companies migrate a vast range of applications, databases, OSes and infrastructures into the cloud. Their streamlined and well-defined 3-step process can address all kinds of common cloud migration challenges such as legacy applications, complex databases, busy and continuously changing workloads, and downtime and performance disruption.
CloudEndure is a very robust enterprise-grade migration solution, designed for rapid, large-scale migrations even within highly secure regulated environments. With its non-disruptive continuous replication of data and short cutover windows, it has best-in-class ratings for Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) metrics.
CloudEndure has a simple setup that lets you get started in minutes with the same highly automated process for any workload (regardless of OS type/version, application, or DB) that minimizes complexity and risk of business disruption.
The CloudEndure migration process has three steps:
At source OS level, a very lightweight (using about 0.5% of CPU) CloudEndure agent is installed. Then an initial sync process is kicked off, in which the agent reads block level transactions from the on-premise environment. The agent then replicates the data to a staging area. The staging area is a light weight, low cost subnet where replication of disks from the source machines is stored.
Then tests and cutover drills are run into any desired AWS instances.
Complete the replication and calculation of cutover window. At this point, CloudEndure can also ingest the blueprint from a source like TSO Logic to optimize the instances to cutover.
The staging is setup. The cutover window is setup. Now migration can be done. Take a snapshot of the volumes in the staging area, and then using the CloudEndure Machine Converter, convert these instances exactly as provisioned in the TSO Logic blueprint and then spin them up as EC2 instances for final deployment.
ATCC maintains the largest and most diverse collection of biological materials in the world. They have molecular genomic tools, microorganisms, and even viruses.
ATCC’s environment (31 production services, 8 TB of data) was hosted in a data center for several years. However, suddenly, they were given a three month notice that their provider would be shutting down operations.
This presented a significant challenge because ATCC receives a significant portion of business from its e-commerce website and could afford virtually zero downtime.
With a significant effort ahead of them and a dwindling timeframe to migrate in, ATCC brought in Mission for their AWS expertise and migration experience.
The challenge in this migration was sequencing the migration of ATCC’s servers. You have to make sure you understand the environment (and its dependencies) that you are migrating and work out the sequencing.
Mission leveraged CloudEndure to do block level streaming migration of ATCC’s resources into the staging area over multiple trial runs, with no impact on the existing legacy datacenter environment.
CloudEndure’s automated migration process boosted efficiency and confidence. Several repeatable test migration runs informed the final migration plan. Dry-run environments were tested to build confidence for final migration. Following successful, tested, and validated dry-runs, migration happened in less than a single day.
To learn more about how we can help you leverage TSO Logic and CloudEndure for your migration, contact us anytime.