How to Migrate — Application Migration to Amazon Web Services
Why AWS
The union evaluated several cloud providers before selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS). They concluded that building their Web Application is the most cost-effective solution, and AWS provides all the services required to perform the required functionalities required to build an efficient application and deliver it. A server less approach was decided on to build the application.
To facilitate the continuous build and deployment environment in AWS, the union chose to work with Aspire NXT, an IT services provider that is part of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
A client wanted to migrate a .net Application for Telecom Site Management. This is a very critical application and should never go down. Hosting an application on AWS comes with lot of perks and benefits.
Some are as under:
- High level of Scalability
- High level of Availability using Multi-AZ setup
- MS SQL Availability using log shipping
- Better and easy Secure posturing
- Operational Efficiency
- Cost effectiveness
- Comparatively better Performance
AWS Services:
- AWS EC2
- AWS S3
- AWS WAF
- AWS ELB
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS CloudTrail
Other Services:
- OpenVPN
- Microsoft SQL Server with Log Shipping
- Window Server 2016
Assessment, Analysis and Design:
- Application was hosted on the application developer’s infrastructure. We analysed and assessed the system requirements, application capabilities, dependencies and the applications ability to leverage AWS services. Application was not capable of using RDS thus we opted for MS-SQL Server on an instance with Log Shipping to ensure high availability.
- We designed the architecture based on our assessment
- We validated the functionality of the architecture by discussing with the application team and deploying the application on a UAT environment.
Implementation:
- We deployed the production environment and executed the cutover from the vendor site seamlessly.
- We started by deploying the VPC and configuring the Subnets, Security Groups and Route Table appropriately
- We then deployed the instances; 2 Microsoft SQL Servers for the database in two AZs and 3 Microsoft Servers 2016 for the web application load balanced with AWS ELB.
- Then, we configured log shipping on the MS SQL Servers for HA
- Next, we migrated the database from vendor using conventional backup and restore.
- After that, the application vendor deployed the application on the launched instances, tested it and executed the cutover.
- We also configured S3 for database backup and application snapshots.
- Furthermore, we enabled AWS WAF for web protection.
- Next, we configure CloudWatch and CloudTrail appropriately.
- Finally, we launched an OpenVPN Service to securely access the infrastructure
