Migrating to AWS: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 3. Discovering Your Workloads

Now that we have built the foundation for why you should migrate and the risks that you should avoid, it is time to get into the real meat of migration. The first step in any migration is to assess what you have in your environment. You need to determine how many servers you have, how much storage you use, and what the components of your network are, such as load balancers. In Chapter 8, we will talk about application discovery and planning. That is when you need to capture rules from the firewalls, but they are OK to skip for now. Right now, we will concentrate on the major components.

The reason you need to perform an in-depth discovery of your workloads is so you can assess costing, create a business justification, and conduct migration planning. You cannot plan and cost for servers and applications that you do not know about. Your natural reaction will probably be to assume that you know all about your infrastructure. Alternatively, you have an elaborate configuration management database (CMDB) that contains all the information you need. That may be true. In my experience, the level of knowledge and documentation about a company’s environment for medium and large enterprises is about 70% correct. Seventy percent rivals house odds in Vegas. I do not know about you, but I will not bet my career on those odds. There are processes and tooling available that make the discovery effort easier and more efficient.

This chapter will walk through ...