The Top 4 AWS Database Migration Pitfalls:A Roadmap for Avoiding Just “Lift and Shift”

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con

ten

ts3 Benefits of The Cloud

Leverage the Cloud Properly

4 Don’t Just Lift and Shift

P I T F A L L # 1

5 Failing to Set Clear Goals

P I T F A L L # 2

6 Failing to Evaluate All AWS Database OptionsToo Complicated, Stay Away!

Lift and Shift Without Evaluation

P I T F A L L # 3

8 Leaving Money on the TablePay Only for What You Use, Use Only What You Need

Avoiding AWS Vendor Lock-In

Maintenance Costs

Determining Total Cost of Ownership

Calculate TCO

P I T F A L L # 4

11 Making Perfect the Enemy of GoodFind an AWS partner

Accelerate Time to Value with a Skilled AWS Partner

12 Attributes to Seek in a Partner

13 About dbSeer

3d b S e e r T H E T O P 4 A W S D A T A B A S E M I G R A T I O N P I T F A L L S

Don’t just leverage

the cloud. Leverage it

properly.

>>Benefits of The CloudThe value in moving from on-prem to Amazon Web Services is well understood. Modern IT infrastructure is increasingly dominated by cloud computing. Over one million AWS users worldwide currently benefit from the elasticity, security, and reduced costs that come with the move to the cloud.

Leverage the Cloud ProperlyWhen moving to AWS, you have a plethora of choices, including multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages.

But how do you go about making those choices?The extensive variety of services offered by AWS provides great value and utility to users… along with a degree of risk. While cost per hour for services such as Redshift may be low, the numerous costs can add up quickly. The result, at best, is that costs are not reduced as much as possible, and at worst, anticipated cost savings from leveraging the cloud are eroded.

Don’t just leverage the cloud. Leverage it properly.

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Don’t Just Lift and ShiftThe benefits of the cloud, such as elasticity and costs savings, are well understood. What isn’t well understood is the specific pathway required to realize these benefits. Too often, organi-zations simply copy and move their on-prem solution to AWS. While this “lift and shift” approach indeed translates costs from capital to operating expenses, in most cases, it leaves behind much of the reduced costs and additional benefits.

Pure lift and shift enables you to benefit from operational expenses, rather than making large, upfront investments in capital expenditures. However, in order to fully realize all of the possible potential advantages, most organizations will need to reevaluate their architecture. Changes are required in order to fully benefit from the elasticity of AWS, and reduced costs by eliminating unnecessary licensing expenses through shifting to open source services.

The structure of paying only for the capacity that you use has the potential to dramatically reduce costs for many organi-zations. The elasticity provided by AWS is simply impossible to achieve with on-prem computing. Additionally, for mission critical applications, re-architecture and AWS migration can lower costs for redundancy and high availability.

In this eBook, we outline the top four AWS database migration pitfalls, and how to avoid them.

T H E T O P 4 A W S D A T A B A S E M I G R A T I O N P I T F A L L S > > 5d b S e e r P I T F A L L # 1 : F A I L I N G T O S E T C L E A R G O A L S

P I T F A L L # 1

Failing to Set Clear GoalsThere are numerous, well-known benefits to moving to AWS. The reasons for making the move may seem apparent. But it’s important to carefully consider what your particular organization wants to accomplish. You must then prioritize those goals so you can make plans to balance objectives.

After all, if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.

Common goals include:• Reduce costs

• Reduce maintenance effort and expense

• Improve scalability

• Increase agility

• Adopt new technology

• Improve availability

• Speed time to market

• Retire technical debt

With constant pressure to improve, some organizations move to the cloud in a mad rush without proper planning upfront. While it would be nice to simultaneously accomplish every single goal, we realize AWS is no panacea. Goals will sometimes conflict with one another, and you can’t effectively determine the tactics which meet your goals if you’re not clear on prioritization.

T I P S F O R S T E E R I N G C L E A R

Focus on why you are migrating. Maintaining a focus on your specific objectives will impact the way you implement.

Make sure all stakeholders are aligned on prioritization. Consider having a meeting where you continually select the most and least important goals from an exhaustive list. Selecting the extremes is an easier approach, rather than progressively assigning each item an order.

T H E T O P 4 A W S D A T A B A S E M I G R A T I O N P I T F A L L S > > 6d b S e e r P I T F A L L # 2 : F A I L I N G T O E V A L U A T E A L L A W S D A T A B A S E O P T I O N S

Every time you stay with the status quo

you miss out on the opportunity to

do things better.

>> P I T F A L L # 2

Failing to Evaluate All AWS Database OptionsIf you aren’t educated about your various options, you can’t possibly make the selections that will best accomplish your goals. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Too Complicated, Stay Away!Some organizations might decide, after a cursory glance, that migration is simply too challenging or costly. Large enter-prises, in particular, may be deterred by fears of disruption to their business.

Indeed, any complicated path may seem daunting if you’re unfamiliar with the terrain. Choosing to avoid migration, or merely lifting and shifting may be the default selection.

Of course, every time you stay with the status quo, things may not be breaking, but you miss out on the opportunity to do things better and with greater agility. This can lead to losing customers if you can’t innovate faster.

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Lift and Shift Without EvaluationWhile taking your existing infrastructure and moving it in a “lift and shift” style might possibly be ideal, you can’t know this is the best path without first considering alternate paths.

Among the various AWS database choices you’ll have to make is choosing between licensed and open source. Evaluate columnar data store versus relational, and consider NoSQL options for your usage.

Amazon has numerous storage solutions you can select from, at varying price points. These selections must be con- sidered in rearchitecting systems for the cloud. After careful consideration, you may decide that keeping your raw data in cheap data storage, such as S3, and using services such as Elasticsearch, Spark, or Athena meet your application requirements. You may also benefit from decoupling batch processes from your storage, in which case AWS offers various services.

Enterprises often combine data stores for various appli-cations into a single on premise data store. As you plan to migrate to AWS, you might benefit from decoupling these items. Rearchitecting prior to moving legacy workloads can enable you to optimize costs and performance, as well as improve lifecycle maintenance and incorporate new services like real-time data analytics and machine learning. Many firms alter their applications and streamline time-consuming, mundane infrastructure maintenance tasks such as allocating storage.

Developing a migration plan to improve infrastructure can be challenging. Apps that aren’t designed to scale out to underused servers can generate unexpected costs. Costs can also go up if the cloud platform moves the application too far away from the data it uses.

T I P S F O R S T E E R I N G C L E A R

After first establishing and prioritizing your goals, get educated on the database options and which use cases each is best suited for. AWS provides excellent educational resources you can consume in a self- directed fashion.

Engaging with an AWS Partner Network Consulting Partner can also help you understand your options and how they best align with your unique requirements. See our suggestions at the end for selecting a partner.

>>

You can’t know this is the best path without first considering alternate paths.

P I T F A L L # 2 : F A I L I N G T O E V A L U A T E A L L A W S D A T A B A S E O P T I O N S

T H E T O P 4 A W S D A T A B A S E M I G R A T I O N P I T F A L L S > > 8d b S e e r P I T F A L L # 3 : L E A V I N G M O N E Y O N T H E T A B L E

P I T F A L L # 3

Leaving Money on the TableMoving to AWS from on-prem reduces costs. Optimizing your AWS architecture, in lieu of merely “lifting and shifting,” can further reduce costs by as much as 80%.

While AWS easily hosts a variety of licensed databases, in shifting your databases to an Amazon EC2 instance, you must still pay those licensing fees. However, rather than con-tinuing to pay those fees, you could take advantage of any of AWS’ numerous parallel offerings, resulting in a lower cost for improved performance.

This often requires you to also move your existing logic, structure, and code, which can be both time-consuming and expensive to convert to another platform.

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Pay Only for What You Use, Use Only What You NeedA key benefit to AWS is pay-per-use. Users pay only for com-puting resources consumed. Although it’s possible to provision resources in advance, it’s not required. There’s no need to establish a maximum usage level and pay for that capacity at all times.

However, to fully leverage this benefit, you must be sure you’re not using more than necessary. To take full take advantage of this requires the expertise of knowledgeable AWS partners. There are multiple pricing models in AWS, enabling you to optimize your spend.

To avoid missed opportunities, enterprises often size servers to support peak use. Rather than remaining sized for max processing, you can code the software to support the elasticity offered by AWS. For example, a processing engine could be rearchitected to process on a smaller machine, or shut down to create a bigger machine, or, if the architecture supports partitioning, process across ten machines.

Avoiding AWS Vendor Lock-InEnterprises may be cautious of excessive vendor lock-in. Fearing potential negative consequences of being ‘trapped’ in AWS, they may be reluctant to take advantage of many of the AWS native tools. This only results in failure to take full advantage of the pos-sible gains of moving to AWS.

AWS releases many new service offerings as well as hundreds of updates to existing services every year. Updates as well as patching are done for you by AWS. Additionally, many AWS services are based on existing open source technologies which are well-known and proven in the industry.

P I T F A L L # 3 : L E A V I N G M O N E Y O N T H E T A B L E

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Maintenance CostsAlso consider the efforts required for ongoing maintenance and upgrades of your own tools years into the future, including opportunity costs. Your valuable engineers’ time is best spent on projects that can increase revenue and make your organiza-tion more competitive.

While it’s always wise to consider risks, lock-in to AWS isn’t something to be feared.

Determining Total Cost of OwnershipWeighing the financial considerations of owning and operating a data center facility versus employing a cloud infrastructure requires detailed and careful analysis.

Amazon Web Services provides a thorough calculator you can use to estimate your Total Cost of Ownership in moving to the cloud. In addition to the benefits of elasticity, the shift to the cloud removes additional fees associated with on-prem solu-tions such as rent, cooling, and staffing. The TCO Calculator is an excellent tool to start off with.

However, if you examine your existing architecture and consider making changes, you can fully take advantages of all the bene-fits of AWS and lower your costs by up to 80%. This may involve upfront investment, such as converting some of your code. However, the savings can be very high for many organizations, enabling a quick return on investment.

T I P S F O R S T E E R I N G C L E A R

Calculate TCOThis degree of adaptation requires time and a financial investment. Often, organizations don’t have the expertise in-house to conduct the re-architecture properly. Combined with the fact that the cost of the changes, as well as the potential savings are unknown, the proposi-tion may be risky.

By analyzing your existing bills and structure, a skilled partner can estimate potential cost savings by taking these types of steps.

Additionally, TCO benefits increase over time. According to IDC, this relationship between length of time using AWS and return is due to customers leveraging the more optimized environment to generate more apps along a learning curve.

P I T F A L L # 3 : L E A V I N G M O N E Y O N T H E T A B L E

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P I T F A L L # 4

Making Perfect the Enemy of GoodOur fourth pitfall may seem to contradict both the first and second. We first advocate considering and prioritizing your goals, then education yourself on choices. These are important, preliminary steps, but there comes a point where every project begins to be thwarted by “analysis paralysis.” The bene-fits of further planning won’t outweigh the delay in launch. Perfect will always be elusive.

AWS provides you with hundreds of options, and continually releases new offerings. It can be tempting to add many products as you plan your migra-tion. Making perfect the enemy of good is the opposite of “lift and shift,” where organizations don’t make any changes, or redesign the database and data processing engine.

But you must evaluate the tradeoff of each addition. Your biggest gains may come from two to three substantial things. Piling on additional services may not only delay your launch, but unnecessarily inflate your costs.

T I P S F O R S T E E R I N G C L E A R

Remember the goals you established at the beginning. Delaying migration merely delays the achievement of your goals. Focus on your highest priorities, and plan your migration to achieve them.

Also bear in mind that AWS makes experimen-tation easy and low risk, enabling you to move forward with your migration and subsequently make changes. Finalizing decisions and pro-gressing with your migration doesn’t preclude you from making improvements in the future, even the near future. Have bold visions, and start moving forward with baby steps.

P I T F A L L # 4 : M A K I N G P E R F E C T T H E E N E M Y O F G O O D

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Find an AWS partnerNew technologies often promise improved productivity and reduced costs, but to achieve these benefits, implementation must be well-managed. And this is the case for AWS as well. Expert advice is required in order to reduce implementation time and achieve the best pos-sible structure.

The decisions you face as you migrate to AWS are mission critical, with the power to have sig-nificant, reverberating impacts throughout your organization for years into the future. In order to make the ideal decisions for your business, you need both extensive knowledge of the AWS product offerings, and a clear understanding of your organization’s unique goals.

Accelerate Time to Value with a Skilled AWS PartnerThere are numerous decisions which must be made that are unique to every migration. You need a partner that is compatible with your organization, and can understand your business and unique objectives and priorities. A well-suited partner can help accelerate your path up the learning curve in order to maximize your savings and increase your time to value.

Attributes to Seek in a Partner ☐ Consulting Partner status in the AWS Partner Network (APN)

☐ Expertise in the specific technology you need to migrate

☐ If you’d like to commit to gaining expertise internally, seek a partner who can teach you

☐ References

☐ Proven, past successes

checklist

T H E T O P 4 A W S D A T A B A S E M I G R A T I O N P I T F A L L S > > 1 3d b S e e r A B O U T D B S E E R

About dbSeerdbSeer is a new breed of business analytics consulting firm, dedicated to helping our customers take full advantage of their data by transforming it into actionable insight. Leveraging expertise in a variety of data and analytics tech-nologies and by employing our unique analytics framework, we promote an agile approach and project methodology that simplifies each project into a series of short, ROI-justified steps aimed at incrementally reaching the target solution. We match best-of-breed analytics technologies to the needs of our clients to provide the right solution and obtain the best results in the shortest possible time with the least cost and effort.

As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Standard Consulting Partner, dbSeer’s AWS Certified professionals help clients with AWS database migration and data warehouse design, as well as building big data analytics applications. dbSeer works to understand client’s unique objectives and the priorities of their migration in order to help optimize their cloud adoption progress.

Founded in 2013, dbSeer focuses on helping our clients solve their unique analytics, data architecture and design, and data engineering challenges. We recognize that analytics are critical to your business success when properly designed and implemented. As a strategic partner, we work with you to plan, design, develop, and deploy solutions that help you transform data into insight, ultimately improving your business operations.