Project 1: Develop Cloud Migration Plan
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Your next challenge is to create a cloud migration plan document while aligning it with BallotOnlines latest IT policy.
Professionals in the Field
This short video features an IT professional describing the many kinds of challenges he has faced when implementing a cloud migration.
Transcript
CCA640 Course Introduction
A successful cloud migration plan will encompass reviewing both the existing workloads and the postmigration state of the workloads. If the cloud migration plan is set up correctly, you and your migration team will be able to assess some important components, including how to move the existing workloads to the cloud, how to migrate data to the cloud, and any related API integration or automation.
The executive board has made it clear that this Cloud Migration Plan should incorporate industry best practices and standards and meet the relevant business and technical needs of the organization.
There are seven steps in this project, which will take about two weeks to complete.
Check the Project 1: FAQ thread in the discussion area for any updates or clarifications about the project.
Competencies
Your work will be evaluated using the competencies listed below.
9.1: Develop a plan for cloud implementation / migration.
9.3: Develop documentation (plans, policies, and procedures) to support cloud operation.
10.3: Configure cloud management tools and software.
10.7: Configure a public cloud infrastructure using industry leading provider(s).
11.1: Perform system auditing.
11.3: Upgrade the infrastructure to increase capacity.
11.4: Monitor system performance.
11.5: Perform system maintenance.
Step 1: Research Cloud Premigration Considerations
In this step, you will research premigration considerations, such as the analysis of the current workloads that are being served out of BallotOnlines existing IT infrastructure, and how the cloud migration plan will align with business objectives and BallotOnlines updated IT policies, which includes the cloud addendum you recently wrote.
Take Note
Your supervisor, Sophia, has recommended that you use your Cloud Adoption Policy Addendum from CCS 630: Cloud Infrastructure Planning, Design, and Configurations, as you are looking at migration considerations.
There are some factors to consider in understanding the technical and business impacts of any proposed workload migration plan. These include premigration assessment, data migration, application migration, API integration or automation, and user migrations.
You should engage in an online conversation with your colleagues to discuss premigration considerations in the Discussion: Data Migration vs. Application Migration Strategies.
After discussing potential data migration vs. application migration strategies in the discussion, you can move to the next step, where you will take a close look at potential tools to evaluate migrating workloads to the cloud.
Step 2: Review and Compare Cloud Premigration Assessment Tools
In this step, you will learn about some of the leading tools available that can aid in the cloud premigration assessment and help you identify the technical requirements for each workload to be migrated to the cloud.
Take Note
Your supervisor, Sophia, has asked you to review the following cloud premigration planning and assessment tools, and create a table that will compare each tool and highlight their capabilities:
AWS Application Discovery Service
NetApp OnCommand Insight
Azure Migrate
After reviewing and creating the feature comparison table for the above-listed tools, submit your comparison using the Premigration Assessment Tool Comparison Template.
Step 3: Explore AWS Application Discovery Service
Premigration Terminology
Application inventory: List of all the applications.
Application dependencies and baseline system mapping: All the components that an application relies on for its optimal operations are referred to as its dependencies. Initial alignment of IT resources with the applications is referred to as baseline system mapping.
Process performance: Process performance is the performance of each process that an application uses for its optimal operations.
Sophia has asked to learn more about the details with AWS Application Discovery Service before you deploy it to analyze BallotOnlines workloads later in the migration planning process.
AWS Application Discovery Service uses either agents or collectors to discover the performance, capacity, and applications running on an individual as well as multiple systems/servers.
The service collects and presents configuration, usage, and behavior data from your servers to help plan migration projects, allowing you to identify application inventory and application dependencies, establish and map a baseline for your system, and determine process performance.
After reviewing the AWS Application Discovery Services website, engage in an online conversation with your colleagues at BallotOnline in the Discussion: Evaluation of AWS Application Discovery Service and then continue to the next step to install a discovery agent.
Step 4: Start Collecting Agent Data
In the previous step, you installed AWS Application Discovery Agent. Its now time to perform a discovery of the LAMP stack, which gathers information about all the processes running in the server, system performance, and network connection information. This is needed prior to the migration.
AWS Application Discovery Agent provides a set of public API (application programming interface) operations and open data formats. These allow the program to work with other tools.
Take Action
Go to the Start Discovery Agent Data Collection for guidance how to start collecting server data.
After you have deployed AWS Application Discovery Agent, proceed to the next step, where you will evaluate the data you collected.
Step 5: Install AWS Application Discovery Agent
At this point in the migration planning process, youve considered premigration issues, reviewed premigration assessment tools, and familiarized yourself with AWS Application Discovery Services. You are now ready to install and test the AWS Application Discovery Agent.
Understanding the AWS Application Discovery Agent is important because it will allow you to collect information from the server about the performance, capacity, and application on a specific server. This information will be helpful with sizing the target AWS service for this workload.
Take Action
Note that before you can install the AWS application, you need to create an environment for the application by setting up a web service stack, known as a LAMP stack, using the LAMP Stack Deployment Guide.
Take Action
Before using AWS migration services, you must designate a Migration Region. The Migration Region can be any supported region; services can be migrated to any region regardless of the Migration Region setting (it is used to store the migration data):
Set Migration Region
This LAMP stack will be configured to be similar to an existing server that BallotOnline has in production. You will then install the AWS Application Discovery Agent on your LAMP stack server. As proof of concept, test the AWS Application Discovery Agent in a test environment. Remember, you should always perform a test prior to implementing anything new in a production environment.
Take Action
Create a new IAM user for use by the AWS Application Discovery Agent: :
Create IAM user for AWS Application Discovery Agent
Take Action
Use the following resource to install AWS Application Discovery Agent:
Discovery Agent installation steps
Step 6: Evaluate the Data Collected
In this step, you will evaluate the results of the discovery conducted in the previous step. After analyzing the results, you will be in a better position to appropriately plan the migration of the workload to AWS.
Take Action
Export and download the data collected by AWS Application Discovery Agent and analyze the data to identify application processes running on the server, view the application dependencies, map a baseline for your system, and determine process performance.
See View, Export, and Explore Discovered Data for guidance. Make sure that you specify the export start date/time of less than 72 hours before the current date/time.
Review performance data and processes to identify dependencies. Based on your analysis, provide recommendations and your rationale for the most appropriate AWS service for the migration.
Take Action
Once data is collected, you can safely delete your LAMP stack. Since CloudFormation was used to create the LAMP stack, the easiest way to remove the stack and ensure costs do not continue to accure, delete the stack. To delete the stack:
From the CloudFormation console, click on Stacks
Select the stack created for this project.
Click Delete and accept any confirmation questions
All stack components will be removed
Key Points
Keep in mind that your LAMP server is not running any additional applications, so its load is not heavy. But you will see what data is collected so you can come to a conclusion about the usability of AWS Application Discovery.
On a production server, the data will be more reflective of the servers application load and its performance.
Step 7: Write the Final Cloud Migration Plan
Now you can consolidate the work that you have completed in the steps along with some additional elements (scope, executive summary, etc.) to create a comprehensive migration plan that aligns to BallotOnlines existing IT policies. Sophia will present your work for approval at the executive meeting.
Professionals in the Field
If you dont understand the details of your business, you are going to fail.
Manfred Bluemel, Zeitgeist Research, former head of corporate market research at Amazon, in a quote often attributed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Jopson, 2012).
At this point, you should have a better understanding of the cloud migration strategy and how a cloud migration plan differs from a traditional IT data center migration plan. This knowledge differentiates you from a traditional IT professional and solidifies your standing in the ranks of cloud computing professionals.
The final document should be between eight and 10 pages. Use the Cloud Migration Plan Guide to write your Cloud Migration Plan and submit it after reading the instructions below.
Check Your Evaluation Criteria
Before you submit your assignment, review the competencies below, which your instructor will use to evaluate your work. A good practice would be to use each competency as a self-check to confirm you have incorporated all of them. To view the complete grading rubric, click My Tools, select Assignments from the drop-down menu, and then click the project title.
9.1: Develop a plan for cloud implementation / migration.
9.3: Develop documentation (plans, policies, and procedures) to support cloud operation.
10.3: Configure cloud management tools and software.
10.7: Configure a public cloud infrastructure using industry leading provider(s).
11.1: Perform system auditing.
11.3: Upgrade the infrastructure to increase capacity.
11.4: Monitor system performance.
11.5: Perform system maintenance.
