Day 14: Kickstarting AWS Cloud Project Setup – Lift & Shift Strategy

Welcome Back to My DevOps Journey!

Hello everyone! Welcome to Day 14 of my 30-day DevOps journey. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been diving deep into AWS and exploring its powerful features that are essential for any DevOps professional. Today marks the beginning of an exciting new phase where I’ll be applying what I’ve learned to real-world scenarios. Specifically, I’ll be starting with the "Lift & Shift" strategy for migrating applications to the AWS Cloud, as outlined in Section 12 of Imran Teli's "DevOps Beginners to Advanced with Projects" course.

What is Lift & Shift?
Lift & Shift is a cloud migration strategy where existing applications are "lifted" from their current environments and "shifted" to a cloud platform like AWS with minimal or no modifications. This approach is often used as a first step in migrating to the cloud, allowing organizations to quickly move to a more scalable and cost-effective environment.

Why Choose Lift & Shift?
Speed of Migration: Lift & Shift enables rapid cloud adoption, reducing the time and effort required to refactor or rearchitect applications.
Cost Efficiency: By moving to the cloud, organizations can take advantage of AWS’s pay-as-you-go model, potentially lowering their overall infrastructure costs.
Scalability and Flexibility: Applications moved to AWS can benefit from the scalability and flexibility of cloud resources, making it easier to handle varying workloads.
Key Components in a Lift & Shift Migration

1. AWS EC2 Instances What It Is: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud. It allows you to run virtual servers and scale them up or down as needed. How It’s Used: In a Lift & Shift migration, EC2 instances are used to host your applications in the cloud, replicating the environment they previously ran in on-premises servers.
2. Amazon S3 for Storage What It Is: Amazon S3 provides scalable object storage for any type of data. It’s ideal for storing application data, backups, and other assets that were previously stored on local or networked storage devices. How It’s Used: Data previously stored on on-premises servers is migrated to S3, where it can be securely stored, accessed, and managed with AWS’s advanced data management features.
3. AWS Database Services What It Is: AWS offers several managed database services, including Amazon RDS for relational databases and Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL databases. How It’s Used: Databases can be migrated to AWS using services like AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), which helps to move your on-premises databases to Amazon RDS or DynamoDB.
4. AWS Networking (VPC, Security Groups, etc.) What It Is: AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) allows you to create a secure, isolated network environment for your resources. Security groups and network ACLs help control traffic to your instances. How It’s Used: The networking setup for your application is replicated in AWS using VPCs, subnets, and security groups to ensure that your application remains secure and performs as expected. Steps Involved in Lift & Shift Assessment and Planning:

Identify the applications and workloads that will be migrated.
Evaluate the current environment to understand dependencies and resource requirements.
Develop a migration plan that outlines the steps and timelines.
Setting Up the AWS Environment:

Configure your AWS environment, including VPC, subnets, security groups, and IAM roles.
Set up the necessary EC2 instances and configure them to replicate your on-premises servers.
Data Migration:

Use AWS tools like AWS Snowball or AWS DataSync to transfer large datasets to S3.
Migrate databases using AWS DMS to Amazon RDS or DynamoDB.
Application Migration:

Move your applications to the configured EC2 instances.
Test the applications to ensure they function correctly in the new environment.
Optimization:

After migration, optimize your AWS resources by right-sizing instances, setting up auto-scaling, and using cost management tools.
My Learning Experience
Starting the Lift & Shift phase of my DevOps journey has been both challenging and rewarding. Understanding how to assess an existing environment and plan a migration to AWS is crucial for minimizing downtime and ensuring a smooth transition. AWS provides a comprehensive set of tools to make this process as seamless as possible, which is something every DevOps professional should be familiar with.

What’s Next?
Tomorrow, I’ll be diving deeper into the specifics of setting up an AWS environment for Lift & Shift, focusing on practical steps to configure VPCs, EC2 instances, and more. This will be an essential step before we actually start moving applications to the cloud.

Connect with Me
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn for more updates and to join the conversation. Let’s continue learning and exploring the exciting world of DevOps together!