3.4.1. Migration Planning & Discovery (Discovery Tools, Migration Readiness Assessment)

💡 First Principle: A successful cloud migration is built upon a foundation of thorough discovery and meticulous planning, which minimizes risks, accurately forecasts costs, and ensures alignment with business objectives.

Scenario: A large enterprise with a complex on-premises environment needs to plan its cloud migration. Before moving any workloads, they need to inventory all their physical and virtual servers, understand application dependencies, and assess their overall readiness for migration.

Effective migration begins long before data starts moving. It requires comprehensive assessment and detailed planning.

• Discovery Tools:
  • "AWS Application Discovery Service": Collects server configuration, performance, and usage data from on-premises data centers.
  • Practical Relevance: Helps identify dependencies, determine right-sizing for cloud instances, and plan migration waves.
  • "AWS Migration Hub": Centralized dashboard to track progress of application migrations from on-premises to AWS. Integrates with various migration tools.
  • "AWS Migration Evaluator": Provides migration readiness assessments and "TCO" analysis.
• Migration Readiness Assessment ("MRA"): A structured assessment of an organization's readiness across various dimensions (e.g., business, people, process, platform, security, operations).
  • Practical Relevance: Identifies gaps and areas for improvement before migration begins. Helps develop a migration roadmap and addresses non-technical challenges.
• Portfolio Assessment: Categorizing applications based on complexity, criticality, and migration strategy (e.g., "6 Rs").
• Dependencies Mapping: Identify all inter-application and intra-application dependencies to plan migration waves that minimize disruption.
• Business Case and "TCO" Analysis: Quantify the benefits and costs of migration to justify the investment.

Visual: Migration Planning & Discovery Process

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⚠️ Common Pitfall: Focusing only on the technical discovery and ignoring the business and people aspects. A migration can fail due to a lack of business buy-in or an operations team that isn't trained for the cloud, even if the technology is perfect.

Key Trade-Offs:

• Depth of Discovery vs. Speed of Migration: A very deep discovery phase takes longer but significantly de-risks the migration. A faster, more shallow discovery might accelerate the start but increases the risk of unforeseen issues later.

Reflection Question: How would you utilize "AWS Application Discovery Service" and a "Migration Readiness Assessment" to gather the necessary data and prepare a comprehensive migration plan for a large enterprise with a complex on-premises environment, ensuring all physical and virtual servers are inventoried, application dependencies are understood, and overall readiness is assessed before initiating any workload moves?