Best Practices to Move Infra Workloads in AWS - Part Three

Monitor and Maintain Your Environment

Monitoring and maintaining your environment after migrating infrastructure workloads to AWS is an important step. Here are some best practices for monitoring and maintaining your infrastructure on AWS:

1. Use CloudWatch: Amazon CloudWatch is a service that allows you to monitor your AWS resources and the applications you run on AWS. It allows you to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms.
2. Use AWS Trusted Advisor: AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides recommendations to help you optimize your AWS usage and improve performance, security, and cost optimization.
3. Use AWS Config: AWS Config is a service that allows you to track and audit changes to your resources.
4. Use Auto Scaling: Auto Scaling allows you to automatically add or remove resources based on the traffic to your application. This can help to ensure that your application is always running optimally.
5. Use Elastic Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancing is a service that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances. This allows you to ensure that your application is always running optimally.
6. Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that allows you to easily deploy, run, and scale web applications and services.
7. Use AWS X-Ray: AWS X-Ray is a service that allows you to trace requests as they travel through your application, and identify performance bottlenecks and errors.
8. Use AWS Systems Manager: AWS Systems Manager is a collection of capabilities that helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems.
9. Implement a backup strategy: Implement a backup strategy for your data and applications to ensure that you can recover from data loss or corruption.
10. Keep your software updated: Keep your software updated to the latest versions, to address known vulnerabilities and also to take advantage of new features and enhancements.

Leverage AWS Services

Leveraging AWS services is an important step when migrating infrastructure workloads to AWS, as it allows organizations to take advantage of the scalable and resilient features of the AWS platform. Here are some examples of AWS services that organizations can leverage:

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): This service provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud and is a fundamental building block for many other AWS services.
2. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): This service provides persistent block storage for use with EC2 instances, and is suitable for both magnetic and SSD storage.
3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): This service provides object storage through a web service interface, and is useful for storing and retrieving any amount of data from anywhere.
4. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): This service allows you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It supports various databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and also Amazon Aurora.
5. Amazon DynamoDB: This service is a fully managed NoSQL database service that makes it simple and cost-effective to store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic.
6. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): These services are used to run, scale, and orchestrate containerized applications.
7. AWS Lambda: This service allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers, making it easy to build applications and services that automatically scale.
8. Amazon CloudFront: This service is a content delivery network (CDN) that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally.
9. AWS Elasticsearch Service: This service is a fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy

AWS Migration Services

AWS provides a range of migration services that organizations can use to migrate their infrastructure workloads to the cloud. Here are some examples of AWS migration services that organizations can consider using:

1. AWS Application Discovery Service: This service helps organizations to identify and map their on-premises applications, servers and infrastructure for migration to the cloud.
2. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS): This service helps to migrate databases from various sources like on-premises or other cloud providers to AWS databases like Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, or Amazon DynamoDB.
3. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS): This service makes it easier and faster for you to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS.
4. AWS Snowball and Snowmobile: These services help to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS, including moving large data sets into the cloud and moving data to another data center or on-premises location.
5. AWS CloudEndure Migration: This service uses machine learning to automate the replication of entire on-premises or cloud-based infrastructure to AWS, enabling near-zero downtime disaster recovery and migration.
6. AWS DataSync: This service accelerates data transfer to AWS storage services over the internet or AWS Direct Connect. This can be used to migrate data from the on-premises data center to cloud storage and also between different regions.

By using these migration services, organizations can simplify and automate the migration process, reduce downtime, minimize data loss and minimize the complexity of migration, making the migration process more efficient and less risky.

It is important to evaluate the migration service that best fits the organization's needs and also ensure that it aligns with the migration plan and strategy.

Continuously Improve

Continuously improving your infrastructure when migrating workloads to AWS is an important step to ensure that your applications are running optimally, and that your infrastructure is cost-effective and secure. Here are some best practices for continuously improving your infrastructure on AWS:

1. Monitor and Measure: Use AWS services like CloudWatch, Trusted Advisor, and Config to monitor and measure the performance and security of your infrastructure. Analyze the data that these services provide to identify areas where improvements can be made.
2. Automate: Automate repetitive tasks such as scaling, updates, and backups to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of errors.
3. Optimize: Continuously look for ways to optimize your infrastructure to reduce costs, improve performance and scalability, and improve security. Use services like Cost Explorer and Trusted Advisor to identify areas where improvements can be made.
4. Keep Software updated: Keep all your software updated to the latest versions to address known vulnerabilities, and also to take advantage of new features and enhancements.
5. Test and Validate: Regularly test and validate your infrastructure and disaster recovery plans to ensure that they are working as expected and that you are prepared for any disruptions.
6. Continuously Learn: Keep up to date with the latest best practices and trends in the industry, and continuously learn about new AWS services and features that can help you improve your infrastructure.
7. Review: Schedule regular reviews of your infrastructure, assess what's working well, and what needs improvement, and make necessary changes accordingly.

By continuously improving your infrastructure, you can ensure that your applications are running optimally and that your infrastructure is cost-effective and secure. Additionally, this also allows the organization to take advantage of new features and capabilities of the AWS platform, which will enhance the overall solution

Zimble One - A Select Consulting AWS Partner can help you migrate with confidence to AWS

A partner organization like Zimble One can help a company implement best practices when migrating infrastructure workloads to AWS. Zimble One may help in several ways:

1. Zimble One can conduct an assessment of the company's current environment, including an inventory of the company's on-premises workloads and applications, to identify which workloads are candidates for migration to AWS.
2. Zimble One can help the company choose the appropriate migration strategy based on the company's business requirements and the specific characteristics of the workloads to be migrated.
3. Zimble One can assist in the testing of the migration process, including testing the functionality, performance, security, and compliance of the migrated workloads.
4. Zimble One can assist the company in planning for High availability and Disaster recovery, by creating a disaster recovery plan and testing it regularly to ensure that it will work as expected in the event of an actual disaster.
5. Zimble One can assist the company in optimizing the cost of their infrastructure by utilizing On-Demand and Reserved Instances, using Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, and using AWS Cost Explorer and Trusted Advisor.
6. Zimble One can assist in securing the environment by using Identity and Access Management (IAM), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Security Groups, and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs)
7. Zimble One can assist the company in monitoring and maintaining the environment, using CloudWatch, Trusted Advisor, and Config and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and X-Ray to ensure that the infrastructure is running optimally and any issues are identified and resolved quickly.
8. Zimble One can assist in Leveraging AWS services, by providing guidance on which services to use for the specific workloads being migrated and help in migrating the workloads using services like AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), AWS Server Migration Service (SMS), and AWS CloudEndure Migration.
9. Zimble One can assist the company in continuously improving the infrastructure by providing regular assessments, monitoring, testing, and performance optimization, and helping the company keep up-to-date with new AWS services and features that can help improve the infrastructure.

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