AWS – Two Ears One Mouth IT Consulting

Amazon Web Services is a little-known division of the online retail giant, except for those of us in the business of IT. Its interesting to see that the profits from AWS represented 56 percent of Amazon’s total operating income with $2.57 billion in revenue. While AWS amounted to about 9 percent of total revenue, its margins and sustained growth make it stand out on Wall Street. As businesses make the move to the cloud they may ponder what it takes Getting Started with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

When we have helped organizations evolve by moving part or all of their IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud, we have found that planning is the key to their success. Most businesses have had some cloud presence in their IT infrastructure. The most common, Software as a Service (SaaS), has lead the hyper growth of the cloud. What I will consider here with AWS is how businesses use it for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is defined as a form of cloud computing that relocates a business’s applications that are currently on their own servers to a hosted cloud provider. Businesses consider this to reduce hardware cost, become more agile with their IT and even improve security. To follow are the 5 simple steps we have developed to move to IaaS with AWS.

Getting Started with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

1) Define the workloads to migrate- The first cloud migration should be kept as simple as possible. Do not start your cloud practice with any business critical or production applications. A good idea, and where many businesses start, is a data backup solution. You can use your existing backup software or one that partners with AWS currently. These are industry leaders such as Commvault and Veritas, and if you already use these solutions that is even better. Start small and you may even find you can operated in the free tier of Amazon virtual server or instances. (https://aws.amazon.com/free/)

2) Calculate cost and Return on Investment (ROI)- Of the two primary types of costs used to calculate ROI, hard and soft costs, hard costs seem to be the greatest savings as you first start your cloud presence. These costs include the server hardware used, if cloud isn’t already utilized, as well as the time needed to assemble and configure it. When configuring a physical hardware server a hardware technician will have to make an estimation on the applications growth in order to size the server properly. With AWS it’s pay as you go, only renting what you actually use. Other hard cost such as power consumption and networking costs will be saved as well. Many times when starting small, it doesn’t take a formal process of ROI or documenting soft costs, such as customer satisfaction, to see that it makes sense. Finally, another advantage of starting with a modest presence in the AWS infrastructure is that you may be able to stay within the free tier for the first year. This offering includes certain types of storage suitable for backups and the networking needed for data migration.

3) Determine cloud compatibility- There are still applications that don’t work well in a cloud environment. That is why it is important to work with a partner that has experience in cloud implementation. It can be as simple as an application that requires a premium of bandwidth, or is sensitive to data latency. Additionally, industries that are subject to regulation, such as PCI/DSS or HIPAA are further incentivized to understand what is required and the associated costs . For instance, healthcare organizations are bound to secure their Protected Health Information (PHI). This regulated data should be encrypted both in transit and at rest. This example of encryption wouldn’t necessarily change your ROI, but needs to be considered. A strong IT governance platform is always a good idea and can assure smooth sailing for the years to come.

4) Determine how to migrate existing data to the cloud- Amazon AWS provides many ways to migrate data, most of which will not incur any additional fees. These proven methods not only help secure your data but also speed up the process of implementation of your first cloud instance. To follow are the most popular ways.

a) Virtual Private Network- This common but secure transport method is available to move data via the internet that is not sensitive to latency. In most cases a separate virtual server for an AWS storage gateway will be used.
b) Direct Connect- AWS customers can create a dedicated telecom connection to the AWS infrastructure in their region of the world. These pipes are typically either 1 or 10 Gbps and are provided by the customer’s telecommunications provider. They will terminate at the far end of an Amazon partner datacenter. For example, in the midwest this location is in Virginia. The AWS customer pays for the circuit as well as a small recurring cross-connect fee for the datacenter.
c) Import/Export– AWS will allow their customers to ship their own storage devices containing data to AWS to be migrated to their cloud instance. AWS publishes a list of compatible devices and will return the hardware when the migration is completed.

d) Snowball– Snowball is similar to import/export except that Amazon provides the storage devices for this product. A Snowball can store up to 50 Terabytes (TB) of data and can be combined in series with up to 4 other Snowballs. It also makes sense in sites with little or no internet connectivity. This unique device is set to ship as is, there is no need to box it up. It can encrypt the data and has two 10 GIG Ethernet ports for data transfer. Devices like the Snowball are vital for migrations with large amounts of data. Below is a chart showing approximate transfer times depending on the internet connection speed and the amount of data to be transferred. It is easy to see large migrations couldn’t happen without these devices. The final column shows the amount of data where is makes sense to “seed” the data with a hardware devices rather than transfer it over the internet or a direct connection.

Company’s Internet Speed	Theoretical days to xfer 100 TB @ 80% Utilization	Amount of data to consider device
T3 (44.73 Mbps)	269 days	2 TB or more
100 Mbps	120 days	5 TB or more
1000 Mbps (GIG)	12 days	60 TB or more

1) Test and Monitor- Once your instance is setup, and all the data migrated, it’s time to test. Best practices are to test the application in the most realistic setting possible. This means during business hours and in an environment when bandwidth consumption will be similar to the production environment. You wont need to look far to find products that can monitor the health of your AWS instances; AWS provides a free utility called CloudWatch. CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications. CloudWatch alarms send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring based on rules that you define. For example, you can monitor the CPU usage and disk reads and writes of your Amazon instances and then use this data to determine whether you should launch additional instances to handle increased load. You can also use this data to stop under-used instances to save money. In addition to monitoring the built-in metrics that come with AWS, you can monitor your own custom metrics. With CloudWatch, you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

To meet and learn more about how AWS can benefit your organization contact me at (513) 227-4131 or jim.conwell@outlook.com.

image courtesy of eweek.com

In the world of technology, partnerships are vital as no provider does everything well. Some partnerships appear successful at first glance, but others require more of a wait and see approach. When I first heard that VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were forming a partnership I felt I wanted a better explanation as to how it would work before deciding on its merits. My cynicism was primarily founded in VMware’s previous attempts to play the public cloud market such as the failed vCloud Air. After learning more, I’m still not convinced it will work but the more I understand, the more sense it makes.

It can be said that VMware invented the cloud through its pioneering of the technology of virtualization. It allowed the enterprise in the 1990’s to spend less money on IT hardware and infrastructure. They taught users how to build and add to an IT infrastructure in minutes rather than weeks. They taught us how to make IT departments to be agile. In a similar way, it seemed that AWS has built an enormous and rapidly growing industry from nothing. It had the foresight to take their excess IT infrastructure and sell it, or more precisely rent it. This excess infrastructure had the ability to be rented because it was built on their flavor of virtualization. For these two to join forces does make sense. Many businesses have built their virtualized IT infrastructure, or cloud, with the VMware hypervisor. This can be on the premises, in another data center or both. With the trend for corporate IT infrastructure to migrate off-site, the business is left with a decision. Should they take a “lift and shift” strategy to migrate data off site or should they redesign their applications for a native cloud environment? The lift and shift strategy refers to moving an application or operation from one environment to another without redesigning the application. When a business has invested in VMware and management has decided to move infrastructure off site, a lift and shift strategy makes sense.

To follow is a more detailed look at a couple of the advantages of this partnership and why it makes sense to work with VMware and AWS together.

Operational Benefits

With VMware Cloud on AWS, an organization that is familiar with VMware can create a simple and consistent operational strategy of their Multi-cloud environment. VMware’s feature sets and tools for compute (vSphere), storage (vSAN) and networking (NSX) can all be utilized. There is no need to change VMware provisioning, storage, and lifecycle policies. This means you can easily move applications between their on-premises environments and AWS without having to purchase any new hardware, rewrite applications, or modify your operations. Utilizing features like vMotion and VMware Site Recovery Manager have been optimized for AWS allowing users migrate and protect critical applications at all their sites.

Scalability and Global Reach

Using the vCenter web client and VMware‘s unique features like vMotion enhance AWS. AWS’s inherent benefits of unlimited scale and multiple Availability Zones (AZ) fit hand in glove with VMware’s cloud management. A primary example is an East Coast enterprise opening a West Coast office. The AWS cloud will allow a user to create infrastructure on the AZ West Coast on demand in minutes. VMware’s vCenter web client will allow management of the new site as well as the existing primary infrastructure from a single pane of glass. This example displays not only how the enterprise can take advantage of the benefits of this partnership but also that the partnership will appeal to the needs of a larger enterprise.

The benefit above, as with the solution in total, is based on the foundation of an existing VMware infrastructure. This article has just touched on a couple of the advantages of the VMware AWS partnership, there are many. It may be noted that cost is not one of them. This shouldn’t surprise many IT professionals as large public cloud offerings don’t typically reduce cost. Likewise, VMware has never been known as an inexpensive hypervisor. The enterprise may realize soft cost reduction by removing much of the complexity, risk, and time associated with moving to the hybrid cloud.

Both AWS and VMware are leaders in their categories and are here to stay. Whether this partnership survives or flourishes, however, only time will tell.

If you would like to learn more about a multi-cloud strategy for your business contact us at: Jim Conwell (513) 227-4131 jim.conwell@twoearsonemouth.net

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