Migrating an application to AWS means moving your software, data, and workloads from on-premises or another cloud provider to the Amazon Web Services cloud environment. Migrating an application to AWS is a smart move for businesses that want to scale efficiently, reduce infrastructure costs, and take advantage of the cloud’s flexibility. But it can be overwhelming to migrate, especially if you’re doing it for the first time.
We’ll take you through the steps you need to follow to migrate to AWS.
How to migrate your application to AWS
Step 1. Assess your current environment
Before you begin, audit your existing infrastructure. Here, you need to identify all the components, including servers, databases, storage, codebases and other dependencies. You can use the AWS Migration Evaluator to estimate the total cost of ownership (TCO).
It’s a good idea to document performance requirements, compliance, and user needs before you begin the migration.
Step 2. Choose a migration strategy
Now, you need to pick a strategy based on your app’s complexity and business goals. Some common AWS migration strategies include:
Rehosting (Lift and shift): Move the app as-is to EC2 or Lightsail.
Replatforming: Slight changes like moving from self-managed DB to RDS.
Refactoring: Rewrite parts of the app to make it cloud-native (e.g., microservices).
Retiring or Retaining: Decommission or keep apps that don’t need migration.
Step 3. Set up your AWS environment
Once you’ve decided on the strategy, you need to prepare the destination to receive what you’re migrating. For this, you need to create an AWS account, set up an IAM user and roles with proper permissions, create VPCs, subnets, and security groups and set up target services (EC2, RDS, S3, etc.).
You can also use AWS Landing Zone for enterprise setups.
Step 4. Choose AWS migration tools
Based on the migration type you’ve chosen, choose the AWS service that will allow you to carry out this migration:
Server migration: AWS Application Migration Service
Database migration: AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
VM migration: AWS VM Import/Export
Mass data transfer: AWS Snowball or AWS DataSync
Step 5. Migrate data and application
Now that you’ve chosen the tool, you can start moving your app and data. You can use AWS Application Migration Service to replicate servers to EC2, use DMS to migrate live databases with minimal downtime, transfer static assets like images, logs, or backups to S3, and set up infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation or Terraform.
Step 6. Test and validate
Before switching traffic, validate performance, data integrity, and dependencies, test application features and integrations in the AWS environment and simulate real-world load using AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray.
Step 7. Cut over and monitor
Once the testing is complete, you can then switch DNS to route traffic to AWS and monitor usage, logs, and errors.
