AWS Application Migration Service
Learn how to automate the migration of applications to AWS using AWS Application Migration Service.
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AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) is a rehosting solution used to migrate physical, virtual, and cloud applications, servers, and databases to AWS. It allows organizations to shift their infrastructure to AWS without disturbing their business operations during migration.
With MGN, businesses don’t need to worry about compatibility or performance issues of their resources. It simplifies the migration process by automatically replicating, converting, and launching servers into the user’s AWS account.
Additional information: Applications can be migrated to AWS from physical servers, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and other cloud technologies.
Benefits of MGN
AWS Application Migration Service offers multiple benefits to its users migrating their resources to AWS. With MGN, users can modernize their applications during the migration process. This feature allows them to deploy their applications and databases on AWS without doing any additional resource conversion. It offers disaster recovery, operating system, and license conversion during the migration process.
MGN has simplified and streamlined the time-consuming processes of migration. Traditionally, migrating one application from one environment to another required manual effort, resulting in higher costs and time consumption. MGN is a lift-and-shift solution that automatically converts on-premises, virtual, and on-cloud infrastructure to run independently on AWS.
AWS Application Migration Services replicates the migrated applications and servers, keeping the data up-to-date. Hence, no information is lost during the migration process, and all business operations run without any hindrance.
How MGN works
AWS Application Migration Service uses a continuous, block-level migration method. The AWS Replication Agent is installed on the source servers to begin replication. Once the agent is installed, MGN creates a staging area subnet that uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The instances function as replication servers and begin full-load replication of data from the source environment to the target AWS environment.
The agent installed on source servers sends data to the replication servers, which is stored in the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). EBS uses the EBS encryption method to encrypt and compress data here. Instances can be launched to perform tests without disturbing or hindering the normal execution of the data in the source environment.
After testing, the cutover instances can be launched. Once confirmed that all the launched instances, replicated servers, and applications are working properly in AWS, the replication process can be stopped. Users can update or add additional features, such as disaster recovery, to their replicated data using AWS services.
Note: The agent installation instructions for Windows and Linux are different, as they have their own installers and parameters.
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