Thinking of migrating your workloads to the cloud? Before you do, learn all about the importance of optimization and licensing assessment to ensure a successful long-term outcome.
In our recent Talking Out Cloud leadership chat series, we heard from AWS Migration Workload Specialist, Dries Endert, who shared his valuable insights on the importance of laying the early foundations of any migration business case with deep dive assessments. Get ready to learn what’s involved in an AWS OLA, what’s in it for your business, and how AWS and its Partners can support you migrate, optimize, and modernize on the cloud.
#1 For customers looking to migrate workloads to AWS, what’s the starting point? And what AWS programs can support the first steps?
Customers that are not on AWS can be hosted in so many different ways. The first thing we always do is to get a clear understanding of their needs and what their long term journey is; this gives a foundational view of what their right-sized and optimized environment on AWS would look like. We typically start with the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA). With this program you can essentially build your business case for migrating to the AWS cloud.
We run discovery tooling and do a licensing health check to get a really strong understanding of what customers have deployed in their existing IT infrastructure. Next we look at the utilization rates, like CPU and RAM utilization, and then we right-size that environment and map it to Amazon EC2.
We also assess their Microsoft licensing estate and identify what they can potentially migrate to AWS and what may need to be hosted as a license on AWS. We want to make sure that our customers can make the most out of their existing license investments while moving everything we possibly can so that customers don’t end up paying twice for the same license, for instance.
#2 Migrating Microsoft workloads to Azure could feel like the most natural transition. How can AWS OLA support a compelling business case for migrating to AWS Cloud?
The first thing I like to do is take a big step back and look at the wider journey when a customer migrates to AWS. As part of our AWS migration methodology, the first phase is to assess their environment – it’s essentially where we build the foundations, let’s say the ‘getting ready’ phase. Ideally, we want to do the pre-assessment early on in a customer’s cloud journey, particularly when they are running Microsoft workloads, before the full AWS migration methodology. So when a customer is thinking that because they have Microsoft operating systems and database engines means simply moving them onto Azure, our OLA can demonstrate the optimization potential if they migrate to AWS.
The AWS culture is to help our customers with cost optimization – it’s always been very clear in our value proposition. So that’s why we built the OLA program and various discovery tools such as the migration evaluator – and it’s actually an agentless tool that we can run, which we recommend for a minimum of seven days. We gather a full inventory of what the customer is running in their IT infrastructure and what they’ve actually deployed. The beauty of the cloud is that you can scale up and down as needed, you can pay-as-you-go, you can reserve some compute if it’s very stable, and that it’ll be predictable.
Also read our blog: Mastering Cloud Optimization: Strategies, Tools, and Best Practices
The depth of the licensing health check can really vary. Some of our really strong Microsoft Competency Partners, like SourceFuse, can provide a range of different recommendations to reduce license spend and other best practices around Microsoft workloads in the cloud. We can then put those analyses together and present a business case back to the customer. And typically what we’ll see is a 36% reduction in compute costs and 45% savings in SQL cores when customers run the optimization and licensing assessment.
So that’s why we say before you just take everything and move it into the cloud, let’s actually work backwards from your data and optimize so you can see what that will look like on AWS. Because at the end of the day, we’re in the business of helping our customers migrate, optimize and then modernize in the long run.Â
#3 If a customer has already decided to migrate to AWS Cloud, could they simply skip the assessment phase?
We can help customers ‘lift and shift’ their workloads into the cloud, and there might be a need to do that, especially if there’s a real urgent, compelling event. For example, a data center evacuation or a disaster recovery scenario. But would I recommend skipping it? No.
And I say that for two primary reasons. One is we want to make sure that we’re setting up our customers for success. If we can get those initial insights on average and peak utilization rates, we can already get a sense of how much we can potentially optimize once the customer is in the cloud.
The second reason why it’s so important at the start of the journey is for the licensing health check. We really want to make sure that we’re asking the right questions to understand which licenses Microsoft or Oracle licenses we can actually bring over to AWS in a compliant fashion. That’s something that often gets overlooked because it’s such a complex universe!
Having been in this role now for about two years, I really do believe in the concept of going slow at the beginning to enable going fast at the end. The more time we spend diving deep and doing our due diligence in the assessment phase, the quicker and the more reliable the migration can be further down the line. It has to do with avoiding unexpected surprises and setting the right expectations for our customers when we do that technical performance assessment.
#4 What are the typical challenges or push-backs when starting an assessment? And how do you overcome them?
Typically, when our customers hear that we’ll provide the tooling, it will only take 3 to 4 weeks, there’s no heavy lifting on their side, and, most importantly, that it’s free of charge with no commitment to proceed further, we don’t get much push back. However, the biggest objections that we may face will revolve around customer bandwidth. The time and effort required to set up a discovery tool and have a look through the installation guide takes some time and our customers are busy, especially in tech and in IT.
That is actually where our AWS partners really help out. I have found that working with our SourceFuse team here in Australia and New Zealand, they can jump in and really facilitate that installation process. And partners can also help ease AWS’s bandwidth because they can take those outputs from the discovery tool and licensing health check and generate the outputs.Â
From a customer perspective, for the licensing health check the challenge is that customers may not have the knowledge of their Microsoft licensing situation. And that’s quite normal actually because it’s such a complex topic. But again, our partners can hop on a call and speak to Microsoft licensing resellers or directly with our Microsoft Specialists team, to help offload the customer’s efforts.
Another objection I typically see is around security concerns. Initially a customer might not want to install an agent on our IT infrastructure because they think that we’ll be collecting some sort of sensitive data. To overcome this challenge and reassure customers, we can provide agent-based tooling and even agent-less tooling.
#5 How does the AWS & SourceFuse partnership benefit customers looking to migrate their workloads to the cloud?
Boiling it down to some of the key ones, I would say firstly it is velocity. When a customer does it themselves there’d be a lot of trial-and-error and learning on the job. But if you bring in a partner as early into the process as possible, one who knows what they’re doing, has specialized expertise in the workloads that you’re dealing with, and has done this hundreds of times, then they can quickly execute.
The next one is being able to bring new knowledge to the table. So coming in as an expert, and particularly when you’re moving into the cloud, it doesn’t just end with migration – partners like SourceFuse also understand the value of modernizing. Within the context of Microsoft workloads, what we’re really talking about here is breaking free from commercial licensing and moving towards cloud-native serverless technologies, modern apps, and microservices. Partners with that depth of knowledge around AWS Cloud can bring forward many suggestions for modernization.
Discover cost-effective and flexible licensing options with AWS OLA
Another key way that a partner can help, even as early on as the OLA, is to challenge your strategy to think about modernizing in the long run to enhance the output. At AWS, and the way we work with our partners, is to not be ‘cookie cutters’. We spend time understanding their long-term strategy and ideal end state and then generate an output, using discovery tools, that makes sense for their strategy. Where I’ve seen SourceFuse really go above and beyond is that they can fill the gaps, adding an extra lens to the OLA and use their understanding of modernization potential to enhance the business case.
The next benefit is around enablement, where partners can play a role with education, helping us communicate to our customers why it’s important for their business. Once a customer has migrated, partners can enable them to run their technologies on AWS, train them to be familiar with the AWS console, and encourage them to be autonomous in the long run. The option, that is equally beneficial, is to have SourceFuse manage everything for them with a cloud managed service. This is another massive win, because you’d have your environment managed by the partner that built your migration strategy.
#6 How do you see the AWS OLA evolving in the future?
It first launched in 2019 and back then we really only had one discovery tool that we would use plus we only focused on migrating Microsoft workloads. Now we have multiple discovery tools that our customers can choose from, we have a way bigger partner network that can execute the OLA program, but more importantly, the source and target workloads have expanded as well.
We also support Oracle and can do some analysis with IBM workloads and storage assessments. Typically, our original discovery tooling was for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments but now we have tooling that can help with cloud-to-cloud assessments. That means rather than just mapping to IaaS on Amazon EC2, we now map to more of our services, for example, our relational database service which includes more of our native storage services. And then, of course, with Amazon EC2 we can also run OLAs on existing EC2 workloads to help our customers modernize or optimize costs.
So, I think that the OLA is only going to get broader in terms of scope. And not only broader in terms of the range of environments that we can analyze or assess – I think that the outputs will also become broader. I think we’ll be able to get more specific and accurate, and we’ll be able to get more flexible in the type of end-state that we can map to. For example, we can map more towards those hypothetical states where we’ve modernized customers’ environments, showing our customers, very early on and with very little effort, the ‘art of the possible’.
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