Is Cloud Migration Some Sort of Game?
Harley Young
AWS Solutions Architecture | Cloud & Sales Engineering Leader | Innovation Strategy | Singapore PR
Businesses that adopt and embrace Amazon Web Services (AWS) can grow their revenues, improve operating margins, enhance asset efficiency and better manage external expectations. Organisations like Netflix, AirBnB, Lyft, Qantas and National Australia Bank have spoken repeated and publicly about their using of AWS, and the ways it has freed their teams to better innovate on behalf of customers.
But, the journey to the cloud, and the complexity of migrations can discourage some from taking the first step. Luckily, Migration Game Days combine fun with serious intent, and use hands-on scenarios resembling actual migration challenges to help participants learn about AWS migration tooling such as CloudEndure and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), the process of moving workloads to AWS, and the steps teams can take to modernising workloads by better matching supply and demand and offloading administration by using managed services such as RDS.
During a Migration Game Day, participants migrate a Windows workload and a two-tier web application (web server + database) of the fictional company BuyMyUnicorns.com into AWS environment. Participants have an opportunity to us AWS tooling such as CloudEndure and (if they chose) DMS to support migrations, exposing them to some of the powerful and free tooling AWS makes available to support cloud modernisation programs. After moving their workloads to AWS, players are then challenges to think about the 5 pillars of the Well Architected Framework as their work to modernise the target environment as increasing load puts their new environment to the test.
At the end of the Migration Game Day, participants will have had a chance to experience a realistic migration using AWS tooling, and have new skills they can take back to their own organisations where they’ll be able to enable their colleagues, and more confidently plan and execute a cloud migration with AWS and one of our many partners.
If you'd like to learn more about Migration Game Days, and organise one for your team, please drop me an email ([email protected]). I'd love to hear from you.