AWS Migration Tools Hope To Attract More On-Premise Workloads To The Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced new services that make it easier for potential customers to move workloads onto its cloud service.

At the cloud division’s Chicago conference on Tuesday, AWS product strategy manager Matt Wood wheeled out a tool called Application Discovery Service, which helps companies identify which applications running in on-premise data centres can be migrated to AWS, along with their associated ‘dependencies’.

Migration

“Application discovery and dependency mapping are important early first steps in the migration process, but difficult to perform at scale due to the lack of automated tools,” said 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 will head into preview within the next few weeks. The announcement comes just weeks after AWS released its Database Migration Service, a tool that helps customers move entire databases onto the Amazon cloud.

Further tools announced were a ‘Transfer Acceleration’ service for Amazon’s S3 storage platform and larger capacity physical storage appliance Snowballs.

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is a feature than speeds up Amazon S3 data transfers by making use of optimised network protocols and the AWS edge infrastructure, said AWS. The company expects improvements in the range of 50 to 100 percent for cross-country transfer.

The Snowball 50 terabyte storage box, which was first announced last November, now comes in a larger, 80 terabyte option. It’s also been made available in four new Regions: AWS GovCloud (US), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). Amazon said it expects to make Snowball available in the remaining AWS Regions in the coming year.

New features were also announced for Amazon Kinesis Streams and Amazon Kinesis Firehose. Firehose sucks data from mobile, web, or telemtry apps right into AWS, but can now stream data  direct to an Amazon Elasticsearch Service cluster. The service Firehose sit on, Kinesis, can also now send metrics to Amazon’s CloudWatch every minute.

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