Updated June 3, 2023
Introduction to Cloud migration services
Cloud migration services are defined as cloud computing services that carry out the procedure of “relocating” particulars of a business in terms of data like details about individuals of the organization, emails, applications, and other characteristics that are necessary for the functioning of the business either to or from a cloud computing environment. There are different types of cloud computing, and enterprises are free to perform any of them as per the requirement of the use case to be solved.
The different types of transfers are, To the cloud, where data, applications, and other characteristics are moved from an on-premise to a “cloud.” The next process is inter-cloud transfers or a cloud-to-cloud migration, where data residing in one cloud can be moved from one platform to another. The final one, called cloud exit, is the data movement from the cloud to on-premise.
Services of Cloud migration
With the advent of big data and analytics, the usage of the cloud is inevitable, and for any business to migrate to the cloud is an even bigger accomplishment. The data in an on-premise solution might lack the best infrastructure available in the market, and even if it consists of the infrastructure, it might have to trade-off on the cost. But hosting the data on the cloud would get both the infrastructure within the optimized cost. One can also take advantage of having greater elasticity of performing other tasks, reduce redundancy and improve flexibility, and last but not least, have a pay-as-you-use costing model as one uses the cloud migration services to migrate.
Now that one understands the benefits of cloud migration and its services, it is essential to understand the strategy behind the cloud migration as it is the strategy that would determine the architecture of the migration is done at the lowest cost using the cloud migration services. The first is understanding the applications that need to be migrated. The decision on the application will enable one to decide the quantum of data that would be needed for migration and the dependencies of data and geographical data principles. The next strategy is to choose from various cloud scenarios, viz. public cloud, which allows computers to connect using the internet or some other connections, private cloud, which uses the proprietary architecture of storing the data and hybrid, which is a mix-and-match of the private and the public cloud. While developing the strategy, it is essential to understand the workload, which brings us to understand the types of migration services in the market, as this article has written.
There is a tremendous transformation that workload management undergoes when the application that is a part of the strategy moves to the cloud. The change in the management process is achieved by the tools and services available in the market. Big players like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services recommend the environment needed for the task in forte cost, security, and performance. Many cloud cost calculators are also available, making budgeting easier before migration. And with that, the services present takes care of the different steps (planning, migration of data, migration of server, migration of database) in the cloud migration process. The services are categorized into the below-mentioned categories, along with examples from the major players like AWS, Azure, and Google:
1. Planning of Migration: To take the first leap of faith to migrate to the cloud, the organization must identify the activities and clearly chalk out the objectives. While using any service for planning, we keep the four components in mind: Learn, Scale, Lead, and Secure.
Different tools are:
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- AWS: Application Discovery Service, Migration Hub, TSO Logic, Cloud Adaption Readiness tool
- Azure: Cloud Adaption Framework, App Service Migration Assistant, Azure Migrate.
- Google: Cloud Adaption Framework, Cloud Maturity Assessment.
2. Migration of Bulk data: Transferring a huge quantity of data to the cloud requires substantial processing and workload management to complete the task and securely migrate hundreds of TBs or even up to 1 PB. Different tools are:
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- AWS: Snowball, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile.
- Azure: Data Box, Data Box Heavy, Data Box Disk.
- Google: Transfer Appliance.
3. Cloud Migration Over Network: The tools in this category automate, simplifies, and thus accelerate the movement of data between on-premise to cloud or in the cloud to cloud migrations. Without even writing a single line of code, one can perform the migration using the different tools mentioned below:
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- AWS: DataSync, Transfer for Secure File Transfer Protocol, Storage Gateway.
- Azure: Azure Stack Edge, Data Box Gateway
- Google: Cloud Online Data Transfer, Storage Transfer Service.
4. Migration of Server: The tools in this category simplify and accelerates the movement of any legacy or traditional tools existing in the system (Windows or Linux) to be able to run on the cloud-based infrastructure known as clusters. This is more of a Data Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
Different tools are:
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- AWS: Server Migration service, CloudEndure Migration.
- Azure: Azure Site Recovery
- Google: Migrate for Compute Engine, Migrate for Anthos
5. Migration of Database: The service offered is to manage database transfer over to cloud infrastructure quickly and securely. The migrations are homogeneous transfers, i.e., Database Type 1 to Database Type 1, or even heterogeneous, i.e., Database Type 1 to Database Type 2. Different tools are:
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- AWS: Database Migration Service, Schema Conversion Tool
- Azure: Database Migration Service
- Google: BigQuery Data Transfer service.
We understand that numerous other tools do the same tasks as mentioned above. Still, organizations need a resilient infrastructure during transfer to migrate. Hence, the ones mentioned above are the most favorite choice for the masses, although some have their own choices not mentioned in this list!
Conclusion
In this article, we tried to understand the various keyboard shortcuts, and based on tasks to be performed, there are the explained cloud computing services depending on the use case of the problem to be solved so that one can take advantage of any of them to complete the requirement!
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