AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Learn About Modernizing on AWS Using Prescribed Pathways in New Partner Training Series

By Erico Penna, Partner Solutions Architect, Migration and Modernization – AWS
By Raghava Kumar Vemu, Sr. Product Manager, Training & Certification – AWS

It’s common to start a cloud journey by migrating applications as-is, which is commonly known as a “lift-and-shift” or “rehost” strategy. An internal AWS study shows this type of migration accounts for 35-50% of the workloads and is the preferred strategy for cases where speed matters.

After this initial migration, customers achieve positive outcomes such as cost savings, increased staff productivity, operational resilience, and business agility. However, the journey does not stop there.

Many customers continue their cloud adoption journey by modernizing and optimizing workloads to reap benefits by leveraging AWS managed services. The same internal study demonstrates that 20% of customer workloads follow a “replatform” strategy and up to 10% undergo through “refactor,” which involves application and architectural changes.

The topic of modernization walks hand in hand with migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS). In most cases, this is a two-step motion where customers 1) migrate the workloads with minimal to no changes using the rehost approach; or 2) modernize the workloads using by re-architecting components and adopting AWS managed services.

Customers can also modernize in a one-step motion, performing major changes and optimizations to applications’ architecture while moving to AWS.

Each legacy application, regardless of size and scale, is unique in terms of design and architecture. There are common avenues one can take to modernize on AWS, and to help customers drive their modernization initiatives AWS has identified six possible modernization pathways.

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Figure 1 – AWS modernization pathways.

Each modernization pathway has a different business value impact in bringing different levels of agility, highly improving and automating operations, and positively impacting total cost of ownership (TCO). Essentially, the higher the scale, the more positive the impact will be.

Effort is equally important and can be measured from low to high levels—where low implies a simpler transformation and high a more complex one.

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Figure 2 – Business value impact.

New Modernization Partner Learning Journey

To help their customers realize the modernization goals, AWS built new training courses and learning journeys exclusively for AWS Partners.

The new digital course Using Modernization Pathways to Modernize on AWS is accessible via AWS Skill Builder and provides an overview of all six modernization pathways and where they fit in the migration and modernization landscape. After taking this course, AWS Partners will be able to understand the value of each pathway and the different AWS services supporting them all.

AWS Partners looking at upskilling and technical enablement can continue their modernization learning journey through six free learning plans, also accessible on AWS Skill Builder. Register today for the new partner learning journey: Pathways to Modernize on AWS.

Note that learners should be logged in to AWS Skill Builder as “AWS Partner” in order to access the registration links and enroll. In addition, AWS Partners with an AWS Skill Builder subscription can access self-paced labs listed in the learning plan description to gain hands-on experience on the AWS services and modernization tools.

Although the learning plans are in no particular order, AWS Partners can benefit by enrolling into each of them to expand their knowledge and combine them to design elaborate modernization solutions for customers.

Below is a complete list of all available learning plans:

  • Move to Managed Databases
  • Move to Containers with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
  • Move to Containers with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • Move to Cloud Native Serverless
  • Move to Modern DevOps
  • Move to Managed Analytics

Other Recommended Content

AWS Partners can also leverage these other recommended modernization resources: