Replatform from On-Premise to EC2: What, Why & How

In this blog, we focus on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), one of the most popular AWS services, as a potential way to successfully replatform your business.

Read on as we go into more detail about what Amazon EC2 entails, why it may be a good fit for your business and how you can make the switch.

Amazon EC2, through its secure and resizable compute capacity,  provides a wide range of choice when it comes to matching your workload’s needs. As the first major provider that supports Intel, AMD and Arm processors, Amazon EC2 is one of the first AWS services that runs virtual machines on the cloud.

Amazon EC2 comes with many capabilities especially in terms of auto-scaling, resiliency, responding to variable demand and the flexibility to install anything from Windows to Linux. What’s more is that it allows you to take advantage of over 200 AWS services without having to pay for or rely on AWS Direct Connect.

Given all these benefits of Amazon EC2, where exactly does your business fit in?

Moving out of a physical data centre is hard. Ideally, you want to leave the on-premise centre without any latency or working dependencies.

However, often businesses are either not ready to invest in proprietary virtual machine technology or want to move to AWS but are not ready for Kubernetes containers. In such cases, Amazon EC2 acts as a stepping stone to further replatforming.

Once your business is on Amazon EC2, you have the option of selecting from a range of options that best fit your needs in terms of saving money, running applications faster and optimizing as needed. So how can your business replatform to Amazon EC2?

There are two main ways to get into Amazon EC2: AWS Application Migration Service and Terraform with Hashicorp Packer. Let’s discuss what each of these look like for your unique business needs.

The AWS Application Migration Service lifts and shifts into Amazon EC2. Although it does not have any ready-to-use templates, Application Migration Service can boast its high speed and accessibility as it does not involve much coding and is easy to get started on.

If you’re a small business looking to use Amazon EC2 as a stop-along-the-way, either because you’ve got to get out of a physical data centre or because you want to move to Kubernetes in the near future, Application Migration Service is the right tool for you.

If you’re a big company that wants to build extra automation and resiliency into the platform, Terraform is the better option for you. Whether you go for the open-source or the cloud option, we suggest using Terraform to get you going faster and farther when it comes to standardization of bigger workloads.

Although using Terraform takes more time, it allows you to build infrastructure as code and set up auto-scaling groups. Hashicorp Packer, on the other hand, also has paid or open-source options that help standardize Amazon EC2 by producing a Golden Image.

If you’re planning to remain on Amazon EC2 for some years, it is wise to invest in the replatform process and use Terraform and Packer to make it more worthwhile, efficient and resilient.

We recommend not spending a lot of time, money and resources into moving to Amazon EC2 if you do not plan on staying there for some time. However, to get the maximum benefit of the platform, a year on Amazon EC2 might be what you need to prepare for the big move to Kubernetes.

Now that you know what Amazon EC2 is, it’s time to decide how you would like to go about it. A Migration Evaluator can help you begin your migration journey and build a data-driven business case.

Get in touch with an AWS partner like Accolite for a Migration Evaluator assessment.