In a real-world project, I served as the Cloud Specialist responsible for migrating an enterprise workload from an on-premises Corporate Data Center to AWS. The goal was to perform a Lift & Shift (rehost) migration, moving both the application and its database to AWS with minimal architectural changes.
Detailed Process
1. Planning Phase
- Assessed the existing on-prem infrastructure, including compute, storage, and network requirements.
- Identified dependencies between the application, database, and any external systems.
- Performed sizing analysis to determine equivalent AWS resources such as EC2 instance types, EBS volume sizes, and VPC networking configuration.
- Defined prerequisites such as IAM roles, key pairs, and security group structures.
- Established resource naming conventions and tagging strategies to maintain consistency across environments.
- Selected the appropriate AWS region based on latency, compliance, and cost considerations.
- Developed a migration plan detailing timelines, rollback procedures, and success criteria.
2. Execution Phase
- Provisioned AWS resources (VPC, subnets, EC2 instances, RDS or self-managed database instances, load balancers, etc.) according to design specifications.
- Configured security measures including IAM policies, firewalls, and encryption where necessary.
- Migrated application and database data using AWS services such as AWS Migration Hub, Application Migration Service (MGN), or Database Migration Service (DMS).
- Ensured that best practices for performance, scalability, and cost optimization were applied throughout the setup.
- Validated connectivity between components and verified application behavior in the staging AWS environment.
3. Go-Live Phase
- Conducted a thorough validation test (Dry Run) to simulate production workloads and ensure functional and performance readiness.
- Identified and resolved any issues discovered during testing.
- Scheduled and executed the final migration (Cutover), switching DNS and routing traffic from the on-prem environment to AWS.
- Monitored system metrics and logs in real-time to verify a smooth transition with minimal downtime.
4. Post Go-Live Phase
- Confirmed that all applications and databases were operational and stable in the new AWS environment.
- Validated user access and confirmed that all post-migration configurations (backups, monitoring, alerts) were functioning properly.
- Documented the final architecture, configurations, and operation guidelines.
- Provided knowledge transfer and operational handover to the support and DevOps teams.
- Reviewed the migration process to identify lessons learned and potential areas for improvement in future migrations.