Improving migration assessments by leveraging AWS Application Discovery Service, AWS Migration Evaluator and AWS Migration Hub

Customers today must build a business case both to see the economics and to visualize the interdependencies of their workloads before making any cloud migration decisions. A business case helps project future-state cloud costs and provides deployment recommendations to build a cloud migration strategy that is best suited to the business needs of a customer. AWS offers three complimentary services to address this need. AWS Application Discovery Service (ADS) helps customers plan migration projects by gathering information about their on-premises data centers. AWS Migration Evaluator identifies the most cost-effective options, provides visibility into multiple migration strategies, and captures insights into how reusing existing software licensing reduces costs even further. AWS Migration Hub provides network visualization that lets customers accelerate migration planning by quickly identifying servers and their dependencies, identifying the role of a server, and grouping servers into applications.

In these early stages of the migration journey, we often see that companies are worried about the complexity of their environment. Many customers leverage AWS Migration Hub to visualize the network dependencies of their on-premises servers before committing to a migration plan. In this post, we illustrate how to export data from AWS ADS to your AWS Migration Evaluator business case. The following are the key benefits of exporting data from AWS ADS to AWS Migration Evaluator:

• Reduce the need to deploy extra on-premises inventory discovery tooling for a migration business case. The same AWS ADS collector can be used for Application dependency mapping within AWS Migration Hub and your business case within AWS Migration Evaluator.
• The business case created includes server tags and application grouping created within AWS Migration Hub. These groups live past the assessment phase of the migration.
• AWS ADS is integrated with AWS Migration Hub that simplifies your migration tracking.

Solution overview

AWS ADS helps enterprise customers plan migration projects by gathering information about their on-premises data centers. AWS Migration Evaluator quickly provides a business case to make sound AWS planning and migration decisions. This post covers how you can leverage inventory and utilization data discovered by AWS ADS as part of your business case.

Walkthrough

The following example is for customers who would like to export data from AWS ADS into AWS Migration Evaluator to create a business case.

Prerequisites

For this walkthrough, you should have the following prerequisites:

• An AWS Account.
• An active AWS Migration Evaluator engagement. If you do not have one, then you can make a request here.
• Have on-premises inventory listed in AWS Migration Hub. Adding your inventory to AWS Migration Hub can be done via the following workflows, although only the Discovery Agent supports collecting the data needed for dependency mapping:
  • The Discovery Agent (agent for Windows or Linux)
  • The Discovery Connector (agentless VMware)
  • File import

Add application groups and tags known by AWS Migration Evaluator to the server inventory in AWS Migration Hub.

1. Sign in to the AWS Migration Hub console.
2. In the left navigation pane, expand Discover, and then choose Servers.
3. From the Actions menu, choose Add tag. Tags supported by AWS Migration Evaluator include: environment, criticality, lineofbusiness, department, migrationwave, and database software.
4. To group the servers into applications, choose Group as application.
5. From the Actions menu, choose Export discovery data to save a ZIP file to your local computer.

Figure 1: In the server section of the AWS Migration Hub console, select the items in the Server Info column that you would like to add tags to. To add tags, select the Actions dropdown, and select “Add tag”.

Figure 2: In the Actions menu, Export discovery data is selected to save a ZIP file to your local computer.

6. Sign in to the AWS Migration Hub console.
7. In the left navigation pane, expand Discover, and then choose Servers.
8. Sign in to the Migration Evaluator console and expand Discover in the left navigation. Select Self Reported Files, then Upload the ZIP file previously downloaded.

1. 1. 1.  If you have multiple AWS Migration Evaluator engagements, you must select the correct one.
   

   Figure 3: In the Migration Evaluator console, under Discover the Self Reported File is selected. If you have multiple AWS Migration Evaluator engagements, then you will need to select the correct one.

   9. Wait until you receive an email confirming that your data has been analyzed and your Migration Evaluator Quick Insights assessment is ready to download. If additional insights are needed, then a directional business case can be created upon request.

    

   

   Figure 4: Migration Evaluator Quick Insights is a one-page report to rapidly understand the projected cost of running your on-premises workloads in the AWS Cloud. This deliverable provides a summary of the number of servers included in the analysis, the projected costs to re-host at AWS based on your usage patterns, and the breakdown of costs by infrastructure and software licenses.

   Conclusion

   In this post, we walked you through how to export the inventory and utilization captured within AWS Migration Hub to AWS Migration Evaluator to deliver a more accurate business case. Creating business cases on your own can be a time-consuming process and doesn’t always identify the most cost-effective deployment and purchasing options. By using AWS ADS export, you can estimate the costs of running on AWS and plan your AWS migration. These results are captured in a transparent business case that aligns business and technology stakeholders and provides a prescriptive next step in your migration journey.

   To learn more about AWS Migration Evaluator, please visit the product page and read the official documentation. If you’re interested in learning more about the AWS ADS, you can also visit the product page.

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