A major communications company, home to some of the world's premier entertainment brands, evaluated both AWS and other cloud providers in preparation for a migration from its five global data centers to the cloud. After selecting AWS, the company worked with AWS Premier Partner 2nd Watch to assess over 7,700 systems that stretched across all five global data centers in order to prepare for the migration and create a roadmap to AWS. Learn about the vendor selection process, what it learned during its Cloud Readiness Assessment, and how it plans to move forward with the migration.

1. © 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Keith Hochberg, Vice President, Cloud Services
Keith Carlson, EVP Services, 2nd Watch
October 2015
ISM201
Preparing for Migration
Developing a Roadmap to AWS for
7,700 Systems and 5 Global Data Centers

2. Welcome
Keith Hochberg, Vice President, Cloud
Services
Keith Carlson, EVP Services, 2nd Watch

3. What to Expect from the Session
• Developing a cloud strategy
• Cloud IaaS selection criteria
• How to approach a cloud migration
• Workload and organizational assessment
• Developing application dependency mapping
• Creating optimized cost estimates for cloud-ready
workloads

4. How our cloud journey began…
• Objectives
• Where can cloud services provide business
benefit? (Broke down our workloads into classes)
• Catalyst for data center consolidation
• Improve time to market and agility
• Improve transparency into cost
• Quickly scale for events
• Geolocate services

5. How our cloud journey began…
• We embraced OpenStack in early 2014 and improved
our service, but…
• We were still managing hardware and cloud software
• Couldn’t geolocate services
• Had to upgrade OpenStack every 6 months for new features
• Chasing public cloud service capabilities
• Migrated workloads to OpenStack (approx. 1,000 VMs) but
then paused

6. First steps toward public cloud
1. Created a cloud architect role that focused 100% on
cloud technology
2. Defined public cloud selection criteria
3. Started researching and testing public cloud service
providers

7. Public cloud IaaS criteria
• Global presence
• Maturity / variety of services
• Innovation pace
• Enterprise support
• Ecosystem of partners
• Pricing model
• Ability to show back cost by workload
• “Direct connect” options

8. What came next?
At re:Invent 2014, we concluded that AWS was the “right
choice”; now what?
How do we tackle this?
• Had to keep the OpenStack lights on
• Started selling it to upper management
• Secure budget
• Wanted to conduct a cloud readiness assessment
• Can we do this on our own?

9. Crossing the chasm
• This transformation was about more than technology
• We needed to understand the TCO
• We wanted validation of our foundational architecture
• We needed to understand how our development group would
leverage it
• We didn’t know how ready the organization was for this
change
• We did not have the time to do all of it ourselves NOW

10. Selection criteria for a partner
• Premier partner
• Skill set
• Ability to execute
• Knowledge of putting the solution together
• Customer service
• Mature team

11. Cloud readiness assessment
Cloud
Readiness
Assessment
Operational
Requirements
High Level
Designs
Detail Level
Designs
Application
Dependency
Mapping
Cost Model
and Resource
Tagging
Application
Assessment
Migration
Plan
Workload
Cost Estimate
Staff
Development
Plan

12. Developing a roadmap
• Organization readiness
• Foundational architecture
• Application mapping and assessment
• Cost model and governance
• AWS cost estimate and TCO
• Migration design and planning

13. Roadmap – Organizational readiness
When you know where you’re going…
• Will you be ready when you get there ?
Education is key for existing players
• Planned and executed strategic workshop for existing groups
• Met with individual team members
• Provide training plan by team, including budget estimate
• Provided living scorecard system for leadership to take action on
Design for long-term agility and manageability:
• Risk management
• Incident response
• Problem management
• Security and governance

14. Roadmap – Foundational architecture
• Requirements based design –
Both business and technical
• Define network topology and
security
• Understand and document
shared services (active
directory, LDAP, etc.)
• Establish not only a granular
design, but best practices for
extending the environment
(e.g., VPC and account
strategy)

15. Roadmap – Application mapping and assessment
• Discovery
• 7,000 servers across 3 data centers
• 1,000 applications
• Automated workload detection
• Collection of runtime metrics
• Identification of the network gravity of individual applications
• Manual workload discovery – How are applications used ? How
should they behave ? What do they do ?
• Assess and classify applications
• Re-host, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild, Replace
• Build an application dependency stack
• Prioritize applications for cloud migration (Re-host and Refactor
categories)

16. Roadmap – Cost model and governance
• Developed AWS resource tagging methodology
• Define tagging strategy (scope, tag keys, tag values)
• Define reporting structure and frequency for cost and
usage data
• Leverage 2W Insight

17. Roadmap – AWS cost estimate and TCO
• Used Automated Discovery activities to help develop a
more accurate baseline for Run-It costs on AWS
• Refined this estimate and laid a framework and
established best practices for ongoing financial
optimization.
• Conducted a “Gut Check” TCO comparison using these
numbers to validate expected savings

18. Roadmap – Migration design and planning
• Profile applications into similar patterns
• Recommended migration methodology and tools appropriate
for each given pattern
• Defined structure for migration team
• Developed a detailed migration process
• Developed Runbook templates for execution
• Piloted the migration with two applications
• Developed a high level plan identifying “waves” of
applications grouped together. Actual schedules to be
defined.

19. Where are we in the journey today?
• Executing on the multi-platform migration
• Transforming to DevOps
• Researching a new container model
• Finalizing our data center consolidation roadmap

20. Remember to complete
your evaluations!

21. Thank you!
Keith Hochberg, Vice President, Cloud Services
Keith Carlson, EVP Services, 2nd Watch