Migration to Amazon cloud for your business
Migration between cloud providers is not an easy task. It must have very compelling reasons behind it and must be approached with due diligence to ensure all the risks and potential pitfalls are negated, and the most cost-efficient and performant approach is taken. IT Svit provides in-depth cloud migration consulting and assistance, guaranteeing that all the tasks are performed on time, with utmost attention to details and in-depth understanding of the required operations.
There are several scenarios to performing cloud migration to Amazon Web Services. The most popular are “lift-and-shift” and cloud-native analogs. Lift-and-shift is the scenario when your existing systems can be moved to the cloud by system engineers practically without any redesign. This is suitable for smaller applications with extensive databases and simple business logic. In this case, cloud architects support the transition by replicating the legacy infrastructure using the AWS cloud components and services, and performing the AWS database migration using dump/restore method.
On the other hand, sometimes the existing infrastructure causes performance bottlenecks, compatibility issues or simply cannot be replicated using cloud tools and web services AWS provides. In this case, the support engineers assess the state of the existing environments, define the role of every component and select the cloud-native analog that will suit to this task best. Then the system is rebuilt from scratch using cloud-native services, platforms and DevOps tool like Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Ansible, ELK stack, Sumologic and others.
It is important to note, that cloud migration to AWS can be performed by multiple specialists — your in-house staff, freelancers, IT outsourcing teams or support engineers from AWS itself. There are advantages and shortcomings to each of these approaches:
- It is hard to hire a decent DevOps engineer in-house, not to mention hiring a whole team. Skilled DevOps engineers are never unemployed, and recruiting one to you internal staff for one project can take a lot of time and effort. In addition, once the cloud migration is complete, you will have to find new tasks for the DevOps specialist to keep him employed for ongoing system maintenance and updates, or allow them to quit to save the money on their salary (and need to repeat the whole process again, if the need for any updates arises)
- Working with freelancers is a double-edged sword. They cost much less, than in-house specialists, but tend to be overconfident with their skills, promise more than they can make, and constantly miss the deadlines. While there surely are decent freelancers or teams on various job marketplaces, the risk of meeting an unscrupulous contractor is very high.
- Working with AWS support engineers is a decent choice. However, their services are costly, your requests will be served along with the queue of their other daily tasks, and they prefer building cloud systems using AWS-based services and features. While these are definitely good, building a cloud infrastructure using AWS-specific web services and functions is a sure way to vendor lock-in. This means that moving from AWS to another cloud platform (should such a need arise) becomes nearly impossible or very costly.
- Hiring a DevOps team from a Managed Services Provider like IT Svit is the most cost-effective solution. We house a team of experienced DevOps engineers and cloud architects, who prefer working with us for two reasons: they face a variety of tasks that helps them grow their skills fast, and they usually have carte blanche to make things work, meaning they can use the latest versions of the best open-source DevOps tools, instead of dealing with the same legacy infrastructure all the time.
- Besides, due to a huge variety of successfully accomplished projects, or DevOps engineers have a plethora of turnkey solutions for the most common challenges related to migration to AWS cloud. Thus said, it is a win-win situation, where the customers quickly get cost-efficient cross-platform cloud systems largely consisting of open-source modules, and IT Svit DevOps team gets ample opportunities to improve their skills.
Thus said, hiring a cohesive DevOps outsourcing team from a Managed Service Provider like IT Svit is a good business decision when performing a cloud migration to Amazon Web Services.
Google Cloud Platform to AWS cloud migration
Many startups begin their operations with GCP, due to inherent software development capabilities of Google App Engine and the ease of Google Kubernetes Engine configuration and management. However, while scaling up, many businesses get compelling reasons to migrate to AWS — scalability and security of AWS CloudFront, ability to combine resources of several AWS accounts through AWS VPC peering, convenience of moving the production environments between different AWS availability zones on request, etc.
