I had an opportunity to head up to San Francisco and attend an all day seminar on Amazon’s new Migration Acceleration Program. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I think it marks a turning point in both the evolution of AWS’ engagement with a broader spectrum of partners, and the kind of structure the IT industry has been needing to hear from the market leader. Amazon has put together a lot of reality-based thinking into this program and I’m excited by the content and what we can expect.
First and foremost, Amazon is putting its money where its mouth is and offering substantial investments for customers who qualify for the MAP. This aggressive marketing demonstrates confidence in the process which is just the kind of attitude I find refreshing.
Amazon has looked at what they have found in common with their 100 most successful migrations and compiled a rubric that covers a very broad set of considerations that cover the complexities inherent in the planning and execution of such strategic moves. They identified eight key work streams, each with their own requirements.
They compiled a set of over 60 questions with the anticipated answers to each question looking at these work streams. These are then scored on a 1 to 5 basis to give a sharp estimation on readiness. Once a customer is considered a candidate for the MAP, their answers to these questions gives all parties a good look at what gaps need to be filled for the acceptance to be made, work to begin and discounts to be applied.
But even if an organization doesn’t qualify for all of the Acceleration Program’s discounts, Amazon’s Cloud Adoption Framework provides solid governance for migration projects no matter what the size. Much of the original material for the framework was presented at last year’s Re:Invent so some of it was already familiar to us. For example the Six Rs of Migration represent a tactical way to look at identified applications so that a proper migration decision can be reached for each. The Five Pillars of the Well Architected Framework are key to understanding if the organization picks Re-Architect as the destiny for a legacy application.
Full 360 will engage its three major consulting practices under the Cloud Adoption Framework. Our Microservices & UX Practice offers Middleware Modernization, API Modernization and greenfield microservice design & development. Our CloudOps Practice offers strategic advice about worldwide deployments, and our Big Data & Data Warehouse Practice will focus on that business. Where partners cannot staff every aspect of the Cloud Adoption Framework they can partner with Amazon Professional Services to fill in gaps. Where Full 360 is particularly strong, in the area of database migrations, we expect other Amazon partners to team up with us. A full blown MAP migration will take 2–3 years and as you can imagine, requirements will get very complex. This is where we expect to shine. Our deep experience in designing and tuning data-centric applications makes us a world-class provider. Amazon has made some useful distinctions in terminology to help customers understand cases.
When it comes to Database Migrations, there are Homogenous and Heterogeneous Migrations. A simple Rehost (second of the six Rs) would consist, for example, of migrating MSSQL on-premise to MSSQL on EC2. That would be homogeneous aka a “lift and shift”. Similarly Oracle to Oracle RDS is a Homogenous Rehost. These are very convenient and our customers find them to be very economical. Another case would be a Rehost + Replatform. That would be moving Oracle on-premise to Postgres RDS, a heterogeneous move. Any of these migrations can take advantage of Amazon Database Migration Service (DMS) which can replicate static or live databases with a variety of batch or realtime incremental options. DMS can also identify how compatible heterogeneous databases can be. Full 360 has anticipated this tool and built SneaQL which enables organizations to complete tricky heterogeneous migrations that cannot be accomplished by DMS alone.
Our Big Data & Data Warehouse Practice is dedicated to offer the finest service you can get, but we understand that as much as companies want to get their data-centric applications it tip-top shape, one-off application migrations to AWS don’t often happen and no migration should happen in a vacuum. That is why we are so pleased to be a part of the Amazon Partner Network and are evolving our best practices to use the same terminology and framework as Amazon’s most successful migration customers have.
If you have considered the economic, reliability, security or performance benefits of migrating your organizations data assets to the Amazon cloud, but had concerns about the complexities of implementing all that, come talk to us. We can start with Lift and Shift and go forward from there.
