Accelerating large-scale migrations to AWS with CloudEndure Migration Factory

Many customers today want to migrate their servers to AWS as quickly as possible. This is often due to data center lease rapidly approach the termination/ renewal stages, or a first step in a large technology transformation program. This is not an easy activity, especially when you may have hundreds, if not thousands, of servers to migrate within a short time frame. CloudEndure helps with rehost migrations by automating the migration capability on a server by server basis. However, how do you manage and orchestrate this when there are over 100 servers to migrate and a diverse portfolio of operating systems? This blog post introduces the CloudEndure Migration Factory.

What is CloudEndure?

CloudEndure offers a highly automated migration capability to simplify and expedite re-host migrations to AWS at no charge. Once the Cloudendure Agent is installed on your source machine, it continuously replicates the block-level data to a designated staging area in the target AWS account, without application disruption or performance impact. This replication uses the existing connectivity already established to the account from your source environment (such as an AWS Direct Connect or VPN over internet) over port 1500. Since, it is a Continuous Data Replication at block-level, it’s capable of migrating any application and any database running on a supported operating system.

Once you’re ready to cut-over (or test the migration), you can launch Amazon EC2 instances from CloudEndure to the target subnet/environment. CloudEndure executes an automated and fully managed machine conversion and orchestration process, allowing migrated applications and databases to run natively in AWS on Amazon EC2 instances within minutes in your target subnet with minimal IT skills necessary. The fully managed machine conversion includes injecting the appropriate AWS drivers, making appropriate boot-loader changes, modifying network adapters, and activating operating systems using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

Figure 1. Working mechanism of CloudEndure Migration

What is CloudEndure Migration Factory?

CloudEndure Migration Factory (CEMF) is an orchestration platform powered by CloudEndure for rehosting servers to AWS at scale with a factory like approach. It helps customers with their medium-scale to large-scale migrations by automating manual processes, which are often slow or complex to scale. The factory consists of a server-less web application (deployed into your account using AWS CloudFormation) and execution scripts. Once the factory is deployed, you simply import your migration data (i.e. information about your source servers grouped into migration waves), and then orchestrate the processes using the CEMF execution scripts. Progress on all migrations can then be monitored inside the web portal.

Take, for example, deploying the CloudEndure agent. Installing the agent on one server takes about 5 minutes and is fairly straightforward. However, if you have 100 servers running both Microsoft Windows and Linux for 10 different CloudEndure projects, there can be 20 different ways to install the agent on the source machine, and this process could take over 500 minutes in total. The CEMF automation script reduces the agent installation time from 500 minutes to less than 5 minutes of operator time, and it works for both Windows and Linux operating systems and any target AWS account. This is just one of the multiple steps which CEMF helps automate (please see image underneath). Also, you can customize the automation script or add your own automation using the same RestAPI to achieve your business outcomes.

You can use the CloudEndure Migration Factory to accelerate and automate your large-scale migrations to AWS with CloudEndure at no charge. You only pay for the AWS resources (e.g., Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito and Amazon DynamoDB) that are provisioned to orchestrate your CloudEndure migration.

Figure 2. CloudEndure Migration Factory Orchestration

Conclusion

To date, thousands of servers have been migrated to AWS using CEMF. Resideo Technologies, Inc., was able to migrate and cutover its diverse portfolio of applications, including SQL Server and Oracle databases using CloudEndure Migration Factory. This helped Resideo Technologies, Inc. set their cloud-first strategy to modernize IT and drive digital transformation across business lines.

“By partnering closely with AWS Professional Services and the Amazon account team, we achieved incredible success rehosting applications with precision and speed in Resideo’s inceptive move to AWS!”
– Bruce Mathews, CIO Resideo Technologies Inc

“Carrier’s Global Cloud Services (GCS) organization drove a large digital transformation, building momentum and responding to a changing environment. AWS ProServe brought a diverse and global migration team to our transformational journey, partnering closely with us to overcome complex technical, process, and organizational challenges leveraging strong rigor and proven AWS mechanisms of a factory model for mass migration. With the help of AWS ProServe, Carrier GCS achieved its forecasted migration cost savings for 2020, build a secure and scalable cloud platform for new business initiatives, and defined a application modernization strategy on AWS for 2021.
-Adnan Haq, Executive Director, Global Cloud

Get Started with CloudEndure Migration Factory today

CloudEndure Migration Factory (CEMF) was designed to solve these problems for migrations that require rehosting (lift and shift). CloudEndure simplifies, expedites, and reduces the cost of cloud migration by offering a highly automated lift-and-shift solution. CEMF is an orchestration platform powered by CloudEndure for rehosting servers to AWS at scale. It helps customers with their medium-scale to large-scale migrations by automating manual processes, which are often slow or complex to scale. Thousands of servers have been migrated to AWS using CEMF. For example, AWS customers used CEMF to migrate 1,200 servers in 5 months, and were able to cut over more than 600 servers in a single cutover window.

You can learn more including implementation guide on this feature page and if you have any questions, email AWS Professional Services at migration-factory-support@amazon.com

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