In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to migrate your on-premise virtual machines to AWS – focusing mostly on the forklift method – along with key prerequisites and limitations.
Cloud Computing can be described as a metered data center service for running applications at global scale. Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and physical servers, you can use a cloud computing provider’s servers and only pay for the computing resources you actually consume. Now there’s no need to desperately guess at your future capacity needs: you can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required. With Cloud Computing, you can easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks and provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost. By migrating your application to the cloud you can save on power, cooling, administration, and software licensing costs. Once the move is complete, you’ll be free to concentrate on your application, not on infrastructure
Migrating virtual machines (and the applications they’re running) to the cloud can be cumbersome and complicated unless you use the right tools for the job. Amazon Web Services offers a variety of ways to migrate your applications and servers.
Forklift: the forklift, or Lift&Shift, a method is best suited for moving a legacy application to the cloud. That is, rather than moving single system components over time, you forklift the whole environment, with all its complex dependencies, in one go.
Hybrid migration strategy: Rather than moving the entire server all at once, individual parts of the application can be moved. This can reduce the risk of unexpected behavior after migration and it is ideal for 3 Tier applications.
Leverage the cloud: Redesign the application with AWS in mind. It might cost a bit more up front, but embedding scalable and manageable services like auto-scaling and edge caching of static content can greatly reduce administration activities – and costs – over the long haul.
Let’s look at forklifts in detail:
In order to initiate and manage the migration (import), you’ll need to install the Ec2 CLI tools on the machine where the source images reside. You can refer to AWS documentation for installing CLI tools or view the first video of How to Use the AWS Command-Line Interface course.
ec2-import-instance disk_image_filename -f file_format -t instance_type -a architecture -b s3_bucket_name -o owner -w secret_key -p platform_name
ec2-describe-conversion-tasks task_id
This is one common scenario for migrating virtual machines to AWS.
Before choosing any particular migration approach, make sure you understand both its prerequisites and limitations…then boldly migrate to the cloud!
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