How IBM Instana™ Observability can help accelerate AWS cloud migrations by minimizing disruptions and uncertainty
Enterprises migrating from on-premises environments to AWS achieve value across the four pillars of the AWS Cloud Value Framework:
- Cost savings
- Staff Productivity
- Operational Resilience
- Business agility
By migrating their IT infrastructure to the cloud respondents have seen a 43% faster time to market for new application features or functionality, a 20% technology infrastructure cost savings and a 29% increase in focus on innovation1.
As organization migrate their applications to the cloud, they should be aware that 33% of all cloud migrations fail. Cloud migrations are challenging and only 25% of cloud migrations are able to meet their challenges. And staying within budget can be tough. In fact, 75% of cloud migration projects exceed their budget2. Migration projects can be challenging. In fact, only 46% of cloud migration projects can accurately assess the technical feasibility of the project3.
IBM Instana™ Observability Value for AWS Migrations
Increasingly, observability has become one of the critical aspects of a successful cloud migration. Cloud migration observability involves tracking the performance, and availability of your technology stack as well as the end-user experience of your application prior, during and after the migration process while even lowering your costs.
IBM Instana™ is an observability solution that provides real-time visibility into your on-prem as well as your AWS cloud infrastructure. Through its high data fidelity - 100% capture every second – and its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation it allows you to monitor your applications and infrastructure, providing you with insights into performance, availability and end-user experience all through your migration journey.
Customers use IBM Instana to successfully migrate applications to AWS. Instana helps to mitigate disruptions in migrations, assess the technical feasibility of the migration, understand application dependencies, optimize cloud spend, right-size environments and reduce migrations times through collaboration.
IBM Instana™ is an AWS Partner and it’s on the AWS Marketplace with Cloud Operations Software Competency in five solution areas: Cloud Operations: Cloud Financial Management, Monitoring and Observability, Compliance and Auditing, Cloud Governance and Operations Management.
The Guide for AWS large migrations recommends a three phase approach as seen in the figure below.
Figure 1 - Three Phase Migration Approach from AWS[1]
Assess Phase
The first phase of the migration is a critical part of the journey since IT teams must effectively assess the dependencies that exist within the environment to inform migration planning. It’s imperative to accurately benchmark application performance and availability of the on-premises environment to allow for accurate provision and management of cloud resources.
IBM Instana™ uses a single agent architecture to monitor each technology and automatically collects performance metrics, like error rates, page load times and slow transactions to provide an in-depth understanding of how your workloads are functioning on the pre-migration phase. These performance baselines help optimize your cloud planning, prioritization and sizing, as well as ensure application health throughout every phase of the migration.
Mobilize Phase
During the Mobilize phase it’s it is crucial to understand how potential users will interact with their digital endpoints - applications, websites, mobile apps or other online services - and proactively resolve any issues that might lead to an unpleasant user experience. Digital experience monitoring (DEM) with IBM® Instana® Observability makes it possible for your IT teams to observe application performance issues in real time, from an end user’s perspective. This can also be used to prove the business value of migration, by demonstrating how migration has positively impacted performance, and how that performance correlates to key business-related transactions.
IBM Instana is used during the Mobilize phase to evaluate cloud provisioning mechanisms, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and evaluate user impact on application performance. This helps to mitigate business continuity, establish monitoring best practices and assess the technical feasibility of the migration.
Migrate and Modernize Phase
The migrate and modernize phase is where you understand and resolve failures quickly, establish Service Level Objectives and Automated Monitoring and optimize operationalize efficiency. During this phase, the objective is to reduce migration times, minimize user impact, right-size cloud infrastructure, improve operational agility and reduce migration costs and cloud spend.
It’s not enough to just monitor failures or slowness but organizations need to assure that applications are performing appropriately by adhering to performance goals. With IBM Instana™, you can create and manage your Service Level Objectives (SLOs), which are necessary to analyze the quality of service (QoS) and reliability goals in concrete, measurable, objective terms.
For a successful migration it’s important to understand failures, performance and availability issues promptly. IBM Instana™ automatically discovers and maps your cloud deployments to provide complete visibility into every cloud infrastructure component and application service. Real-time event alerts and dependency maps allow everyone, from cloud operators to DevOps teams, to quickly respond and prevent downtime or slowdowns. And using IBM Turbonomic allows you to optimize application performance and costs.
Enterprises migrating from on-premises environments to AWS achieve value in staff productivity, operational resilience, business agility and cost savings. Realizing this value comes with a cost that can be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. In many case the very existence of company relies on the success of a migration and modernization project.
1 - Hackett Group. "The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services" aws.amazon.com, Feb., 2022 | Link
2 - Forbes. "How To Keep Your Business On The Ground While Migrating To The Cloud" forbes..com. Oct 20., 2022 | Link
3 - Flexera. “2023 State of the Cloud Report Cloud: Economic concerns don’t slow cloud growth; FinOps increases in priority" flexera.com., 2023 | Link