Cloud migration patterns – The 7 R’s – Leveraging the Cloud for Digital Transformation
Cloud migration patterns – The 7 R’s
There is more than one way to handle migration. The followings are the 7 R’s cloud patterns defined by AWS:
- Rehost
- Re-platform
- Refactor
- Relocate
- Repurchase
- Retain
- Retire
Creating a detailed strategy that identifies your workloads’ best patterns is essential to accelerating your cloud journey and achieving your desired business objectives. Let’s learn a full breakdown of the 7 R’s and what each migration pattern brings to the table.
Rehost in the cloud
This method is also commonly known as lift and shift. By rehosting your application in the cloud, you perform the least work to move your workloads to the cloud. Applications are being rehosted as they are in a different environment. Services are simply migrated. Let’s say, for example, that you are hosting a simple three-tier application on your on-premises environment that is using the following:
- A webserver
- An app server
- A database server
Using the lift and shift strategy, you would set up three similar servers on the cloud, install the applicable software on each server, and migrate the necessary data. Therefore, this approach will have the lowest migration costs. This simplicity comes at a price. Any problems in the existing applications will come along during the migration. If the current applications are obsolete and suboptimal, they will remain obsolete and suboptimal.Have you ever had to move from one house to another? It’s a painful process, right? In broad strokes, there are two ways that you can pack for the move:
- You can just put everything in a box and move it to the new house.
- You can be judicious and sort through what you have, item by item, and decide if you will toss, sell, recycle, or take the thing with you.
Packing everything and going is a quick way because you avoid sorting through everything, but as you know, it can be more expensive because you will be moving more things, and it is painful because you may realize later that you should not have moved some items, to begin with.The move to the cloud is not very different. Using the lift and shift is good if you are already confident that your processes and workflows are solid and not need to be changed. This is rarely the case. This approach takes everything from the on-premise data center and moves it to the cloud. However, additional work is still required, such as preparing servers, creating VPC, managing user access, and other tasks. You can automate most rehosting with AWS-provided tools such as Cloud Endure and TSO logic. AWS Server Migration Service offers agentless capabilities when you cannot install an agent on the server—making it faster and easier for you to migrate large on-premises workloads to AWS from a snapshot of the existing servers.The Lift and Shift approach may not always allow us to achieve the desired cost optimization, but it is the first step toward the cloud and is still a highly cost-effective option for many organizations. This approach is often the best choice if you want to start the migration process while getting a feel for cloud benefits. Let’s look into other approaches.
