AWS Migration Hub

Migration Hub provides access to the tools that best fit their business requirements. With Migration Hub tools, businesses can plan and track migrations, and refactor and modernize applications on AWS. It acts as a one-stop shop, offering a comprehensive set of tools and functionalities to simplify each stage of the migration journey:

• Discovery: Migration Hub helps us identify on-premises servers, applications, and workloads that are candidates for migration. It gathers valuable insights into the existing infrastructure, including dependencies between servers, databases, and applications. This information is crucial for planning an efficient migration strategy.

• Assessment and planning: We can assess the migration feasibility and potential challenges associated with moving the applications to AWS. It provides recommendations on the most suitable AWS services for our specific needs, considering factors like cost, performance, and scalability.

• Execution and management: This is where Migration Hub truly shines. It integrates with various AWS migration tools, allowing us to choose the ones that best suit our application types and migration goals. Some popular tools include:

  • AWS Database Migration Service (DMS): Streamlines database migration to various AWS database services like Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS.

  • AWS Application Migration Service (AMS): Enables efficient migration of on-premises workloads to AWS, including application re-platforming and modernization.

Migration Hub is a central console for managing these tools, providing a unified view of our migration progress. We can monitor the status of individual servers, databases, and applications throughout the migration process, ensuring everything runs smoothly.

• Flexibility and customization: Migration Hub offers a flexible approach. We can choose to discover servers first and then group them based on dependencies or functionalities for optimized migration. Alternatively, we can jump right into migrating individual servers without prior grouping. This flexibility caters to diverse migration needs and existing application architectures.

• Modernization and optimization: Migration Hub goes beyond simply moving our applications to the cloud. It empowers us to take advantage of the agility and scalability of AWS. By integrating with AWS services for code analysis and refactoring, Migration Hub helps us identify opportunities to modernize the applications and optimize them for the cloud environment.

Discovering on-premises resources

Discovering on-premises resources is a part of Migration Hub functionalities. It allows users to gather details about their servers, group the discovered servers into applications, and plan the migration. However, migration can be directly started while grouping the servers during the process.

The discovery of servers involves the following steps:

1. Choosing the right AWS discovery tool: AWS Migration Hub discovers data about servers using AWS discovery tools. These tools involve Application Discovery Agentless Collector, AWS Application Discovery Agent, Migration Evaluator Collector, and Migration Hub import.

2. Viewing server details: Once one of the discovery tools has discovered the servers, the user can view details. The information, such as the server’s hostname, IP address, performance metrics, and others, can be viewed by performing discovery through any discovery tool. The user must use AWS Application Discovery Agent or Migration Evaluator Collector to view server network connection information. AWS Migration Hub shows a network diagram to let users explore server network connections.

3. Group servers as applications: Grouping servers based on their functional relationships eases the migration process by providing a clearer understanding of the application architecture. The servers can be grouped as applications from the servers list or network diagram. Select the servers from the list or network diagram and group them as a new application or add them to an existing one. If we choose a new application option, name it. Choose the "Group" option.

Users can migrate servers without initially undergoing the discovery process. It is efficient as the migration and grouping of servers as applications occur simultaneously. The servers being migrated appear on the Servers page. Here, the user can combine the servers based on their logical relation and group them as a new application or existing one.

Migrating servers

The first step to migrating on-premises servers and applications to AWS is to connect the migration tools to the AWS Migration Hub. The migration tools communicate with the Migration Hub, allowing it to access migration progress and status. The migration tools will start sending the updates once the process begins. The user could see a list of the servers being migrated. These servers can now be selected and grouped as applications. The users can also track the progress status of grouped servers.