20: Migration
Migrating Data with AWS Snow Family
How do we migrate data to and from the cloud?
- Internet: Using existing connection is convenient but potentially very slow and security risk.
- Direct Connect: Faster and more secure, but not always practical if its not needed after the migration.
- Physical: What is you bundled your data and physically delivered it to AWS? You could bypass the internet altogether.
What is the Snow Family? A stack of hard drives to help you load up your content and physically ship it to AWS.
Snowcone
The smallest device.
- 8TB of storage, 4GB of memory, 2 vCPUs
- Easily migrate data to AWS after you've processed it
- IoT sensor integration
- Perfect for edge computign where space and power are constrained.
Snowball Edge
Jack of all trades.
- 48TB to 81TB of storage.
- Storage, Computer and GPU flavors.
- Varying amount of CPU and RAM.
- Perfect for off-the-grid computing or a migration to AWS.
Snowmobile
The heavy hitter.
- 100 PB of storage.
- Designed for exabyte-scale data center migration.
- Changes are you don't need this.
Exam tips:
- Variety of solutions to transport data. Check to see if you cannot do it over the internet or need encryption at rest and at transit.
- Known the general use cases for different sizes.
- Work in both directions: migrate to and from.
- Timing: normally about a week.
Storage Gateway
Storage gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that helps you merge on-prem resources with the cloud.
Can help with a one-time migration or a long-term pairing of your architecture with AWS.
- All storage gateway solutions are VMs you will run on your environment.
File Gateway
Caching local files.
- Network file share or SMB mount.
- Keep a local copy of recently used files.
- Extend on-prem storage.
- Helps with migrations to AWS.
Volume Gateway
Backup files.
- iSCSI mount.
- Cached or stored mode.
- Create EBS snapshots.
- Perfect for backup or migration.
Tape Gateway
Ditch the tapes.
- Replace physical tapes.
- Doesn't change current workflow.
- Encrypted communication.
Exam tips:
- Storage gateway is hybrid solution.
- Know use cases.
- Out of space on-prem? Which Storage Gateway to use?
- Have a high-level knowledge of Tape Gateway.
AWS DataSync
Agent-based solution for migrating on-prem storage to AWS.
Allows you to easily move data between NFS and SMB shares and AWS storage solutions.
- Encrypted communication.
- Required agent on-prem.
- Supports S3, EFS adnd FSx as supported locations for your data.
- Great for one-time migration.
AWS Transfer Family
Allows you to easily move files in and out of S3 or EFS using SFTP, FTP, FTPS (File Transfer Protocol over SSL).
AWS Transfer basically allows you to swap-out endpoints for these protocols to be S3 and EFS to read and write data to.
- FTP only supported within VPC.
- Other protocols supports from outside of AWS.
Exam tips:
- Legacy: this tool excels.
- Outside of your env in: SFTP, FTPS.
- Inside VPC only: FTP.
- The DNS entry stays the same, but the location for the storage becomes S3.
Moving to the Cloud with Migration Hub
A single place to track progress of you application migration to AWS.
Integrates with Server Migration Service (SMS) and Database Migration Service (DMS).
SMS
- You can schedule when things happen.
- You can track the upload.
- It converts the data to a snapshot.
- Creates an AMI for you to launch on a EC2 instance.
DMS
For Oracle.
- Pickup data from Oracle database.
- Runs with through the AWS Schema Conversion Tool.
- Targets the Amazon Aurora Database.
For MySQL:
- Pickup data from MySQL database.
- Runs through AWS Database Migration service.
- Targets the Amazon Aurora Database.
Note: This is a gross simplification of the tool.
Exam tips:
- You don't need to it ourselves. Just think of what tool you can use when you see migration.
- SMS is best to move existing VMs to AMIs.
- On the exam, favour scenarios where you migrate everything to AWS.