Migrate an ASP.NET Web Application to Elastic Beanstalk with the Windows Web Application Migration Assistant

The CloudFormation template used in this tutorial launches a t3.medium EC2 instance, which is not included in the Free Tier. You can estimate EC2 costs on the EC2 pricing page.

Use CloudFormation to launch an EC2 instance in the US-East-1 Region.

First, you will need to download the YAML file we will use for the CloudFormation template from GitHub. In GitHub, open the context (right-click) menu of the Raw button at the top of the file, select Save Link As. Choose the location on your computer where you want to save the file, and select Save.

Once you have saved the file locally, open the Create stack page within the AWS CloudFormation console. In the Specify template section, select Upload a template file. 

Choose the Choose file button and navigate to the YAML file on your local machine and select Open.

Then choose Next.

Select an existing key pair or create a key pair if you do not have one. Then choose Next.

On the Configure stack options screen, choose Next. At the bottom of the Review screen, choose Submit.

Once the stack has been created, you will see its status change to CREATE_COMPLETE.

 

Select Attach existing policies directly, and enter beanstalk in the search bar to filter the policies. Select the checkbox next to AdministratorAccess-AWSElasticBeanstalk.

• Enter iam in the search bar and select the checkbox next to IAMReadOnlyAccess.
• Enter s3 in the search bar and select the checkbox next to AmazonS3FullAccess.
  
  

Choose Next:Tags, then Next:Review, and then Create user.

After the user is created, choose the Download .csv button when the prompt appears.

Log in to EC2 console here >>

Once you've logged in, select the WWAMA instance and choose Connect.

Select the RDP client tab, then choose the Download remote desktop file button and save the RDP file. Then choose Get password.

Choose Upload private key file to upload your private key, then choose Decrypt password to get your Windows Server password. You will see the password in plain text. Copy it because you will need it in the next step.

Log in to the EC2 instance using the RDP file you saved earlier and provide your password.

 

 

Open a PowerShell terminal as an Administrator by choosing the Windows icon in the lower left corner of the screen, open the Windows PowerShell folder, open the context (right-click) menu for Windows PowerShell, and then choose Run as Administrator.

In the PowerShell window, run the commands provided in the PowerShell sample to the right to configure the AWS credentials. Replace ACCESS_KEY and SECRET_ACCESS_KEY with the values in the CSV file you downloaded earlier during the creation of the MigrationUser.

The migration assistant has been pre-downloaded on the C:\ drive by the CloudFormation template. The file is wwama.zip.

Open the context (right-click) menu for the wwama.zip file and extract the archive.

Open a web browser on the EC2 Windows Server instance and navigate to http://localhost/. You will see the sample website that the migration assistant will migrate.

In the PowerShell terminal you opened earlier, change to the migration assistant directory and launch the migration script.

The assistant prompts you for the location of your credentials file. Press Enter to skip.

When prompted for AWS Profile Name, enter default.

Enter the AWS Region where you'd like your Elastic Beanstalk environment to run. For example: us-east-1. For a list of AWS Regions where Elastic Beanstalk is available, see AWS Elastic Beanstalk endpoints and quotas.

The assistant then discovers any websites running on your IIS server and lists them, as in the following example.

 

 

Enter the number 2 to migrate the sample site.

The assistant then prompts you to update any connection strings selected above. Press Enter as there aren’t any connection strings in this application.

This message will appear: The migration assistant didn't find any connection strings.

Next, name your new Elastic Beanstalk application.

 

 

When prompted to select the Windows Server version, enter 6 and press Enter.

For instance type that the application will run on, press Enter to select the default (t3.medium).

You can get the URL from the output of the PowerShell script.

Input the URL into your web browser, and you should see your web application, now running on Elastic Beanstalk.

 

You can also view the Elastic Beanstalk environment from the AWS console. Make sure you're seeing the console for the same Region you deployed your application to. Feel free to explore what you can do with your application by using the menu on the left side.

Go to the Elastic Beanstalk console. In the Applications view, select the radio button next to your application, choose the Actions menu, then select Delete application. In the confirmation dialog, enter the name of your application and choose Delete. This will delete both your application and the Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Go to the CloudFormation console and delete the CloudFormation stack WWAMAStack created at the start of the lab.

 

 

Go to the Amazon S3 console, select the radio button next to the bucket named elastic-beanstalk-migration-ACCOUNT_ID-TIMESTAMP, where ACCOUNT_ID is your AWS account ID and TIMESTAMP is the time that your application was deployed. Then choose Empty to first empty the contents of the bucket. You will need to confirm this action by entering permanently delete in a text box and choose Empty. Choose Exit to go back to the S3 buckets view.

Now that the S3 bucket is empty, select the radio button next to the bucket again and choose Delete. You will need to confirm this action by entering the name of the bucket in the text box and choose Delete bucket.