Migration of a Workload running in a Corporate Data Center to AWS using the Amazon EC2 and RDS service
In another project based in a real-world scenario, I acted as the Cloud Specialist responsible for migrating a workload running in a Corporate DataCenter to AWS.
The application and database were migrated to AWS using the Lift & Shift (rehost) model, moving both application and database data.
I followed some migration steps: Planning (sizing, prerequisites, resource naming), Execution (resource provisioning, best practices), Go-live (validation test — Dry-run, final migration — Cutover) and Post Go-live (ensure the operation of the application and user access).
In AWS, I created a VPC (virtual private cloud) and its subnets, using a 16-bit mask on the VPC CIDR block to eliminate any overlap with the on-prem server. After setting my public and private subnets in different availability zones to ensure accessibility, I deployed a relational database and created an EC2 instance to host my resources. I chose Ubuntu since it was the Linux distro I’m most familiar with, assigning it a security group and accessing it via SSH to limit inbound traffic only to HTTP recognized ports.
I made a standard MySQL RDS instance with a small storage capacity, set its security group to the same availability zone as my EC2’s public VPC and connected to the VM using Git Bash. It’s necessary to attach an Internet Gateway to your VM so that it accepts inbound traffic, but in a production the EC2 should never accept traffic with as broad a scope as I set. (But since this is just a mini-project, I wasn’t worried about it.) So, I installed some dependencies on my EC2, made some edits to it and my RDS on the MySQL server, and launched the application and tested the application to ensure everything worked smoothly.
I’d say this was a very enlightening experience that exposed me to many technologies I hadn’t been familiar with. I can see now there are some powerful tools available out there to expedite data migrations, many which I plan to employ in future projects.
