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AWS Launches Program To Shift Windows Workloads to Its Cloud
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched an offshoot of its broader Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) that's aimed specifically at helping organizations shift their Windows environments to the AWS cloud.
MAP for Windows is a migration service that "provides services, best practices, and tools to help our customers save costs, accelerate their migrations and modernize their Windows workloads on AWS," according to an AWS announcement.
The service is provided to customers via the AWS Professional Services team and third-party migration services providers in the AWS Partner Network (APN). These partners "have successfully demonstrated completion of multiple large-scale migrations to AWS," wrote Fred Wurden, general manager of enterprise engineering at AWS, in a blog post Monday. "They have received the APN Migration Competency Partner and the Microsoft Workloads Competency designations."
The aim of the program is to help organizations move their Windows workloads to AWS. The service will also provide open source and cloud-native alternatives to customers' legacy SQL Server and Windows Server applications.
Customers will be guided through a three-step migration process:
- A readiness-assessment to help organizations identify potential trouble spots before moving further in the migration process. This stage includes a review of different licensing options that customers should consider in making the move to AWS.
- A "mobilization" period to fix any trouble spots identified in the previous step.
- The actual workload migration.
For particularly cost-conscious organizations, the program will also offer financial resources, according to Wurden. "MAP for Windows also offers financial incentives to help you offset migration costs such as labor, training, and the expense of sometimes running two environments in parallel," he wrote.
More information is available on the MAP for Windows site.