News

AWS To Simplify Application Migration to Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 04/20/2016

Coming soon from Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is a new service designed to simplify the process of planning the migration of enterprise applications to its cloud.

Interested organizations can now sign up for the AWS Application Discovery Service, announced yesterday at the AWS Summit underway in Chicago.

The service will reportedly help systems integrators plan application migrations by discovering all the applications being used in on-premises datacenters, along with any dependencies the applications rely on, and their performance data.

"AWS Application Discovery Service automatically collects configuration and usage data from servers, storage and networking equipment to develop a list of applications, how they perform, and how they are interdependent," the service's Web site states. "This information is securely retained in an AWS Application Discovery Service database, which you can export as a CSV or XML file into your preferred visualization tool or cloud migration solution to help reduce the complexity and time in planning your cloud migration."

AWS said application dependencies are especially complicated to identify at scale because automated tools to do so are lacking -- until now. "AWS Application Discovery Service discovers network communications and associated processes," the company said. "It aggregates this information to derive application and infrastructure level dependencies that exist within your workloads. This helps account for many dependencies when planning your migration to AWS."

The new tool, which provides a set of public APIs and an open data format, will reportedly integrate easily with other tools that actually handle the application migration to the AWS cloud.

AWS said the new service will be available via AWS Professional Services or through one of its APN Partners.

Coincidentally, a cloud services company called Intermedia, which is attending the AWS Summit, just published a new survey designed to investigate the migration of applications to the AWS Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. That survey found that the most likely applications to be hosted on AWS were ERP (cited by 44 percent of respondents), file synchronization and sharing (40 percent), and server backup (38 percent).