Migration strategies

When migrating applications to the cloud, six of the most common migration strategies are :

• Rehosting
• Replatforming
• Refactoring/re-architecting
• Repurchasing
• Retaining
• Retiring

Rehosting also known as “lift-and-shift” involves moving applications without changes. In the scenario of a large legacy application, in which the company is looking to implement its migration and scale quickly to meet a business case, the majority of applications are rehosted.

Replatforming, also known as “lift, tinker, and shift”, involves making a few cloud optimizations to realize a tangible benefit. Optimization is achieved without changing the core architecture of the application.

Refactoring (also known as re-architecting) invloves reimagining how an application is architected and developed by using cloud-native features. Refactoring is driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment.

Repurchasing involves moving from a traditional license to a software-as-a-service model. For example, a business might choose to implement the repurchasing strategy by migrating from a customer relationship management (CRM) system to Salesforce.com

Retaining consists of keeping applications that are critical for the business in the source environment. This might include applications that require major refactoring before they can be migrated, or, work that can be postponed until a later time.

Retiring is the process of removing applications that are no longer needed.

AWS Snow Family

The AWS Snow Family is a collection of physical devices that help to physically transport up to exabytes of data into and out of AWS. AWS Snow Family is composed of AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball and AWS Snowmobile. These devices offer different capacity points and most include built-in computing capabilities. AWS owns and manages the Snow Family devices and integrates with AWS Security, monitoring, storage management and computing capabilities.

• AWS Snowcone is a small, rugged and secure edge computing and data transfer device. It features 2 CPUs, 4 GB of memory and 8 TB of usable storage
• AWS Snowball offers two types of devices : Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices are well suited for large-scale data migrations and recurring transfer workflows in addition to local computing with higher capability needs ( Storage: 80 TB of hard disk drive (HDD) capacity for block volumes and Amazon S3 compatible object storage, and 1 TB of SATA solid state drive (SSD) for block volumes; Compute: 40 vCPUs, and 80 GiB of memory to support Amazon EC2 sbe1 instances (equivalent to C5) ) ; Snowball Edge Compute Optimized provides powerful computing resources for use cases such as machine learning, full motion video analysis, analytics and local computing stacks ( Storage: 42-TB usable HDD capacity for Amazon S3 compatible object storage or Amazon EBS compatible block volumes and 7.68 TB of usable NVMe SSD capacity for Amazon EBS compatible block volumes; Compute: 52 vCPUs, 208 GiB of memory, and an optional NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU. Devices run Amazon EC2 sbe-c and sbe-g instances, which are equivalent to C5, M5a, G3, and P3 instances )
• AWS Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move large amounts of data to AWS. One can transfer up to 100 petabytes of data per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi trailer truck.