On-Premise to AWS Migration

At work, in less than a year, with the help of a consultancy and the devops team from the  central, we managed to migrate from an old hardware based Linux-Web shop to Amazon AWS.

And the change (even after doing a Lift and Shift migration), has been an incredible step forward.

We have passed from os-level storage software mirroring, a set-in-stone hard-coded number of servers and application servers, to an auto-scaling grange of instances.

And now we have forgotten our server names, since we don’t have pets anymore (we have cried when we put them down, just like with any other pets), and we brought an indefinite number of cattle instances to our herd. We don’t put them names any more, we just tag them with a hot iron mark, so we now that they are part of our herd, and we cater for them for a few days or weeks before taking them to the slaughterhouse (more will come after them, so, no need to cry for them anymore).

To learn more about a DevOps classic known as “Pets vs. Cattle“, read on the link.

Now our response times are faster, data, logs and alarms are centralised, disaster recovery and testing is easier to architect and deploy.

All-in-all: a win-win situation.

Here is a nice pic of most of the team members that made this possible.

And do please note, that I have used terms like “Lift & Shift”, “Win-Win”, and the like in this post, which is what is required today to be on the “coolness” front,  otherwise, people might just take you for an old dinosaur. (In the next article I will try to use some other cool-words like Blue-Green deployments and Greenfield-Brownfield, which are also on the list of top-of-the-pops this days) ;o)

 

News of things to come: –MyOwnView Article series,

I am going to write a new article series called MyOwnView, where I will write my particular view of different operating and cloud systems, where I can explain my impressions in old and new systems, and what I love or hate of each. I have administered quite a few systems, and I have enjoyed every single one of them (it’s just that I have enjoyed some, more than others  ;o)

Catch you soon!