In today’s digital world, businesses are increasingly turning to the cloud for its scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness. Migrating your data center to the cloud can be a daunting task, but with the right approach and tools, it can be a successful journey. This Let’s Architect! blog post will guide you through the process of migrating to the cloud with AWS, leveraging the proven AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) and exploring valuable resources to help you navigate each step.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides a comprehensive approach to planning, designing, and deploying your cloud migration. This robust framework outlines a four-phase methodology that guides you through every stage of the process, from strategy and planning to ongoing management and optimization. Here’s a closer look at the four phases of the AWS CAF:

• Envision: Identify business transformation opportunities that align with your strategic goals and demonstrate how the cloud will accelerate your business outcomes.
• Align: Assess your organization’s cloud readiness by identifying capability gaps across six key perspectives (Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations). Address these gaps by developing strategies, ensuring stakeholder alignment, and implementing relevant change management activities.
• Launch: Select impactful pilot initiatives and deploy them in production. These pilots should showcase the value proposition of the cloud and provide valuable insights for further refinement.
• Scale: Focus on expanding production pilots and business value to desired scale and ensuring that the business benefits associated with your cloud investments are realized and sustained.

Figure 1. The AWS CAF recommends four iterative and incremental cloud transformation phases

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Large-scale migration and modernization

Migrating a large-scale data center to the cloud requires careful planning and execution. This video session focuses on valuable lessons learned from the thousands of enterprises who have migrated and modernized their on-premises workloads with AWS. Dive deep on technical lessons learned, mental models used, how to set up teams to modernize as they migrate, and how to engage with AWS Professional Services and AWS Partners for success. Finally, you will get insights on the latest AWS migration and modernization tools.

Figure 2. Migrating to AWS Cloud unlocked major benefits for Live Nation, including a 58% cost saving

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Dive deep into different AWS DMS migration options

At the heart of any successful data migration lies a robust database migration strategy. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) empowers you with a comprehensive suite of tools to seamlessly move and replicate your data. This session explains the various options offered by AWS DMS, including logical replication, managed native methods for export, import, and replication, and bulk extract and load functionalities. Through these options, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of how to migrate and replicate your data, along with the distinct advantages of each approach. The session also explores performance considerations to ensure optimal migration efficiency. Finally, you will learn how modern capabilities like serverless technologies, auto scaling, and schema conversion can simplify migrations.

FIgure 3. AWS DMS Schema Conversion converts your existing database schemas and a majority of the database code objects to a format compatible with the target database

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Application Migration with AWS

Migrating and modernizing your applications is a crucial aspect of your cloud adoption strategy. The Application Migration with AWS workshop series provides hands-on experience with planning and executing application migrations. You’ll learn practical techniques like database replatforming, application rehosting, and containerization to make your move to the cloud smooth and efficient.

Figure 4. As part of this lab, you will perform a database migration with AWS DMS

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But the journey doesn’t end there. As your applications scale in the cloud, managing that growth becomes key. This is where infrastructure as code (IaC) comes in, and AWS CDK takes IaC a step further by allowing you to write infrastructure code in familiar programming languages you already know. This streamlines your migration by leveraging your existing coding knowledge. We recommend this AWS CDK workshop to get started with CDK for infrastructure automation.

See you next time!

Thanks for reading! With this post, we provided resources to help you navigate your cloud migration journey with confidence and success. In the next blog, we will talk about Well-Architected best practices!

To revisit any of our previous posts or explore the entire series, visit the Let’s Architect! page.