5 Steps to Accelerate AWS Cloud Migration

Using AI and automation for better planning, execution, and optimization of your project

Enabling a software-driven business strategy

Moving to cloud gives companies access to technology that allows them to respond quickly to business opportunities, innovate faster, and be more competitive.
If you are transforming business services to the cloud, here are 5 recommended steps to help with:
  • Planning
    Ensure that the app is well suited for cloud and the new design and cloud architecture are effective.
  • Execution
    Avoid problems during cloud migration that impact service delivery and cause delays.
  • Optimization
    Ensure that your new cloud-based environment meets expectations for service delivery

2 essential tips and 5 steps for successful Cloud Migration Processes

Essential Tip #1

You’ll need a complete view of your total environment for best results.
Many tools to retrieve this data follow an agentless approach, which can only help you in a small fraction of necessary decisions.
  • Dynatrace OneAgent, however, offers unique, full-stack observability with AI and advanced automation at the core - constantly feeding dependency information for one complete view - and one source for decision making.
Read more on how this highly differentiated approach is being recognized by industry thought leaders.
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Essential Tip #2

And don’t miss enriching data and context using Dynatrace API’s.
  • Use the Dynatrace API to automate tasks and export different types of data into your third-party tools for migration planning use cases.
  • The more fully you integrate your ecosystem data – the better decisions and actions you’ll execute for a successful migration.
  • For best practices, see Using Dynatrace APIs within Large Monitoring Environments.
See Dynatrace API examples on GitHub.
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With OneAgent and the Dynatrace API engaged, you’re ready to take the first steps toward your AWS Cloud migration.
01

Get a clear picture of your current stack

Before starting a cloud migration project, you have to be an expert on your environment. Good data is essential for accurate assessments, better decisions, and optimized design.
What to consider:
  • Do you know which applications, services, processes, hosts, data centers and technologies you have and where they are running?
  • Can you confidently identify candidates that can be moved to the cloud?
  • Are there identifiable early priorities?
See for yourself how Dynatrace is the only monitoring solution engineered with a one-agent approach that fully and automatically detects all technologies, where they run, and what services they support without modification or manual configuration.
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02

Understand dependencies

A granular approach to analyzing dependencies will help you proactively understand the implications of key services. For example, you don’t want to migrate a service and suddenly introduce high latency or costs because of a missed dependency.
What to consider:
  • What services do you have in your environment?
  • What services can be migrated in isolation?
  • Which services have tight dependencies?
  • What is the network traffic between services you migrate and those needing to stay in the current data center?
  • What are current usage and resource consumption patterns of services?
  • What will it cost you when they are running in the cloud?
One Dynatrace customer, a large airline, has 432 million topology updates per day across 2,500 hosts. See how you might visualize your own Smartscape environment topology here.
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03

Analyze details of traffic dependencies and add predictability

You’ll need to know your network usage between hosts that you intend to move and the hosts that will not be moved. This will help you make “if/then” decisions based on future costs as well as other data, traffic, and resource decisions.
What to consider:
  • Where should we reduce data transfer in general?
  • Which hosts would not be candidates to migrate because of excessive network traffic?
  • Should we invest in data compression, and if so, where?
Check out Dynatrace’s Davis, a radically different AI engine that automatically processes billions of complex dependencies across many layers of technology that cannot be scaled with human expert knowledge. Davis helps you collect data for exact answers to “what happens if I move this” questions.
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04

Be smart on database migration with the power of deep knowledge

Understanding database dependencies will give you insights that inform what to migrate, retain, or replace with database services in the cloud.
What to consider:
  • What databases do we have?
  • Which are candidates for moving?
  • What is the resource consumption of our database servers right now?
  • Which applications and services are dependent on a database that might be impacted by a migration?
  • Should we co-locate some databases?
  • What’s the current performance of key database queries and stored procedures?
  • What tables and data are candidates to extract into a cheaper database system?
Dynatrace’s tips for database migration
  • Resource Utilization
    Use resource utilization data for right-sizing lift and shift instances to help with instance types, sizes, performance, costs.
  • Reduce risk
    Reduce risk and define which apps and services have tight dependencies and why they are better co-located.
  • Get good data
    Get good data to understand where to optimize key queries and where to put less critical data into more cost-efficient options.
Dynatrace’s full-stack approach with OneAgent auto-detects your databases’ infrastructure and gives you detailed metrics so that you can optimize your database performance.
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05

Focus on feature-based business benefit with functional migration

Get information on back-end services, front-end API services, or user-facing features, all through real user monitoring. This helps you decide to migrate individual features or complete applications based on business benefits.
What to consider:
  • What is the distance between your top revenue generating features from your data center?
  • Would moving the feature close to the end-user improve the user experience?
  • Any features using dedicated hardware better suited for on-demand cloud infrastructure?
Did you know?
80% of CIOs agree that it is difficult to successfully map the impact of digital performance on business.
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Dynatrace’s digital experience monitoring (DEM) offers unmatched monitoring visibility – a 360-degree view of every single user journey – and analyzes and optimizes customer experience using real-time data including business impact.
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Accelerate your AWS Cloud migration with Dynatrace

  • Plan better
  • Move faster
  • Operate simpler
Jump start your migration and move your digital business faster with Dynatrace & AWS Cloud.
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Practices here are for migration to AWS Cloud. Going AWS Cloud Native?
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