Maestro: Your Cloud Migration Assistant

Maestro was initially crafted as a hybrid cloud management solution. It enables managing both private and public clouds in a unified way, retrieving analytics for utilization, expenses, and security, and supports the establishment of automated workflows for DevOps.

Recently, there has been an increasing demand for migration from on-premise VMware-based data centers to public clouds.

Below, we give an answer to the question: How Maestro can facilitate such migrations?

The “Six R’s of Cloud Migration”

Nowadays, cloud experts highlight the “Six R’s of Cloud Migration”, or migration strategies: 

• Rehosting (Lift and Shift): Moving an application and its associated data to the cloud without making any changes to the application itself.
• Replatforming: Making minimal changes to the application to optimize it for the cloud, such as changing the database or middleware.
• Repurchasing: Replacing an existing application with a cloud-native version or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
• Refactoring / Re-architecting: Making significant changes to the application's architecture to take full advantage of cloud-native features and capabilities.
• Retire: Decommissioning applications that are no longer needed or have been replaced by cloud-native alternatives.
• Retain: Keeping certain applications on-premises or in a private cloud due to regulatory, compliance, or other business reasons.

When planning migration, these strategies can be adopted individually or in a staged approach. In any case, essential tasks such as assessing the current infrastructure, planning the target setup, and ensuring a smooth transition are crucial, and Maestro serves as an effective platform to assist with these processes.

Maestro as a Migration Assistant

Regardless of the chosen migration strategy, you will need to build a complex process which involves experts of different types and specific toolset. 

Maestro here becomes a platform that can cover a set of primary questions that you need to resolve to make sure that the whole process succeeds:

• Estimating the initial state and composition of the on-premise infrastructure
• Establishing target infrastructure
• Tracking the migration progress and target infrastructure KPIs
• Making sure that the target infrastructure performs as expected.

Maestro hybridization capabilities and API-first approach allow seamless integration into existing customer’s ecosystem, and a single view over both initial and target infrastructures.

Getting acquainted with the product and the overall migration concept is based on our “Five Steps” concept. 

Within this concept, we introduce the Maestro capabilities and assist with migration to a public cloud. We also use the Open Source tools that can be integrated with Maestro to perform the initial infrastructure assessment and plan the future architecture. 

Migration with Maestro: Main Stages

The whole migration process includes the following stages:

1. Creating a test environment for migration, where we collect the necessary telemetry, without reaching customer’s sensitive data.
   
   
2. Inventory.  We identify the existing resources, their load and lifecycles, CPU, disk, network usage. Here, we use the ML-empowered EPAM Syndicate RightSizer, the 60-days telemetry, and the provided topology information (if any), to build a mathematical model of the customer’s computing infrastructure.
   
   
3. Initial Assessment. Using the retrieved data, we build assumptions on how effective the current infrastructure is, and group the detected resources by specific principles.
   
   
4. Target infrastructure assessment. We estimate the structure of necessary resources in the cloud provider(s) to which the migration is planned.
   
   This information will include suggested instance types and families, grouping, and uptime schedules. We also will calculate the TCO for three years of the selected cloud usage.  We can create estimations for different platforms so that you could select the option that is best for you.
   
   Please note: we participate in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program which gives the possibility to get a case-specific offering for your migration process from AWS, with part of the costs for the POC being covered by the vendor. 
   
   Based on the specifics of your workload, we will prepare infrastructure and expenses plan, as well as share the necessary information with AWS (if you select this provider), so that they can build an offering for you.
   
   
5. Migration planning. We plan the order in which the infrastructure parts will be migrated from on-premises to Cloud, and applications switched to the new platform.
   
   
6. POC Migration. We perform migration of a test part of the infrastructure and estimate the resulting performance. Here, we can understand if the migration plan needs any adjustments.
   
   
7. Security Assessment. Migration to a public cloud needs a new type of security measures and approaches. Using “on-premise” approach to perimeter protection does not work here, and we need a complex multi-dimensional protection from different types of threats. Moreover, various standards should be met to ensure that the enterprise, as well as its services and offerings, are secure.
   
   This is where we use EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine to perform a complex security assessment and build recommendations on reaching the necessary level of security.  The tool includes 1000+ security rules facing 10+ world known standards out of the box. 
   
   We can either provide a generalized statistics on the findings, or give details focusing on specific standards or regulations. Thus, you will have a clear understanding of the current issues and the ways in which they can be addressed.
   
   Additionally, we can negotiate to the EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine team to build custom rulesets and add specific standards.

Migration transparency

During the migration, part of the infrastructure will be already hosted in a public cloud or clouds, while the other part will still be within the legacy capacities. Using different tools to manage and track resources on different platforms is not convenient and causes additional risks of errors.

Here, we use Maestro itself as a unified entry point to all used platforms, related reporting, status checks and performance analytics.

It allows to clearly see which part of infrastructure has already migrated, which is in progress, and which is still to go. You can estimate the actual performance within the target cloud, get real-life costs information, and take the best of all available Maestro analytics.

Meanwhile, your infrastructure end users will not be affected and can proceed with their daily tasks with minimum 

To find out more about Maestro analytics capacities, you can investigate the Analytics label in this blog.

Migration of specific resource types

Typically, infrastructure migration includes not only compute capacities, but other types of resources as well. Here, we use resource-specific approach to find the best approach for each case.

For example, for migrating data bases, we use another EPAM tool, migVisor Suite. This is a collection of handy tools specifically designed to make the process of migrating and transforming your data analytics and transactional platforms easier and more efficient.  

In case you use microservices, we can suggest using KubeRocketCI, built based on the open source products of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), such as Tekton, Argo CD, and others. It synchronizes and streamlines the many steps that are key to success of enterprise software development projects, based on microservice architectures.

Additionally, Maestro is integrated with an open source backup solution Bareos. We have a set of in-built scenarios for the most common cases, which allow you to backup an existing on-premise instance and automatically migrate it to a new provider with Terraform, Chef, and Bareos.

If your application is highly sensitive and needs seamless migration, we can suggest using specified native tools and offerings, such as WMvare on AWS which allows to set an intermediate stage before complete migration to cloud.

To conclude

Migrating from an on-premises data center to Cloud is a complex process which needs to be properly planned and coordinated to succeed. Maestro is a reliable and convenient tool to leverage this transition. It helps you to assess the initial infrastructure, plan the future resources, track the migration process, and understand the effectiveness within the new platform. With its unified toolset for both private and public platforms, it gives a single entry point for the migrating resources access, and allows to make sure that the migration effect on system users is minimized.