The 6 R's Model in Cloud Migration (AWS)

INTRODUCTION-

The application migration strategy is a process of migrating the whole application environment to the cloud. It is usually driven by business decisions for cost optimization, agility, flexibility, scalability, and other cloud technology benefits.

An application migration strategy is based on application discovery. Application discovery is a step in cloud migration in which we examine your IT ecosystem and find all the apps that need to be migrated. Based on the priorities, application importance, and complexity, we create a roadmap and determine the strategy for each application.

As pay closer attention to diagram we are using for this you will see the 6 R strategies we are going to disscuss now :

1. REHOST - Also known as “lift-and-shift.”

As the name suggest lift and shift , organization lifts the ON - Premises VM's and shift to Cloud . We are using VM Import and VM export commands for this .

This is also evident in many ways that for organization applications are easier to optimize/re-architect once they are already running in the cloud. Partly because your organization will have developed better skills to do so, and partly because the hard part — migrating the application,data, and traffic — has already been accomplished.

2. REPLATFORM – lift tinkers and shift

Lets think about this way organization using their personal database which is very slow and also want to migrate to cloud . Will they want to use slow database in cloud too . So they are going to migrate the On-Premises VM's and update their database to Amazon Rds . This way they are following the REPLATEFORM strategy .

3. REPURCHASE – Replacing your current environment, casually referred to as “drop and shop.”

This can be the simplest, fastest and least-risk method of running applications in the cloud.Some examples of repurchasing are:

• Swapping an internally administered email server for an online email-as-a-service offering;
• Replacing a self-built VPN server with a vendor-built appliance;
• Moving from a home-grown CRM system to Salesforce.com or HubSpot.

Benefits of Repurchasing

• Let go of the past, grab the future:?replace antiquated systems with modern appliances and SaaS.
• Simplify procurement:?the AWS Marketplace gives a unified procurement mechanism to buy prebuilt solutions from a wide range of vendors. The marketplace includes SaaS products, VM templates, virtual appliances, machine learning models, and more, and supports a range of consumption options such as bring-your-own-license (BYOL), pay-as-you-go, and private offers.Conslusion -
• Reduce in-house skills required:?the systems purchased are built (and, in the case of SaaS, operated) by specialists. You do not need to hire, train and retain these skills in-house.
• Reduce effort/increase speed of migration:?the less there is to migrate and operate, the faster, cheaper and less risky it is.

Risks of?Repurchasing

• Loss of control:?the organisation can no longer influence the schedule for new features, deprecation of old features, or when to upgrade to new versions. The vendor may not commit to an acceptable SLA for the service. They may suffer outages or data loss that cannot be mitigated internally. Their data breaches may expose your customers to harm, and your organisation to penalties and reputational damage.
• Commercial risks:?your chosen vendor may go out of business. They may be acquired by one of your competitors. They may increase prices or terminate a service that you depend on.
• Data-sovereignty:?where does the data (and its backups) reside, and how is it managed? Does this meet your compliance needs?
• System access:?which other systems need to connect to the purchased system? How does single sign-on (SSO) and authorisation work? Are there networking and security implications?
• Integrations and dependencies:?will moving to SaaS require you to upgrade and reconfigure your systems? Are the same versions and configuration options available, or if upgrading will this be backwards compatible?

4. REFACTOR / RE-ARCHITECT

It is most expensive planning and most beneficial strategy in 6 R's

While migrating Organization also wants to minimize their negatives so for that they are using cloud native feature and thats why it is called RE-ARCHITECH strategy and compiles with most expensive one .

5. RETIRE – Decommission or archive unneeded portions of your IT portfolio.

Identifying IT assets that are no longer useful and can be turned off will help boost your business case, and direct your team’s attention toward maintaining the resources that are widely used.

6. RETAIN – Do nothing, for now—revisit.

Organization already updated thier on premises VM's and they dont feel to go on cloud .You should only migrate what makes sense for the business, but the more your portfolio moves to the cloud, the fewer reasons you will have to retain.

Conclusion -

Re-architect is the strategy that delivers the maximum number of benefits, but it requires a lot of work. Retire and retain are the simples because they do not require any work. A re-purchase strategy can help you modernize your app and get new features fast. Re-host is the simples actual migration strategy where we take the system and simply move it into the cloud as-is. Re-platform is an interesting strategy that helps you utilize specialized cloud services and get many benefits without too much work.