re:Invent Partner Day : Cloud Migration and Optimization Session

Join me at 1.30 on October 6th at the AWS re:Invent Global Partner Summit

https://reinvent.awsevents.com/partner-summit.html

Realizing the Benefits of Cloud: Cloud Migration & Application Optimization

As AWS continues to expand, enterprise customers are increasingly looking to our partner ecosystem to assist in migrating their workloads to the cloud.  This session covers migration estimation, data migration, critical path activities, migration automation, and best practices for large-scale application migrations. We will use real examples from our consulting partners and AWS Professional Services to illustrate how to move workloads to the cloud while modernizing the associated applications to take advantage of AWS’ unique benefits. We will also dive into optimization of your application using AWS Services that are non-intrusive to your application, as well as those that require some application changes but help customers to achieve higher levels of performance, high availability, and scalability.  After attending this session, you will understand how to estimate a migration effort, understand the most time intensive tasks, the tools available, options for data migration, when to re-host an application and when to re-architect, and how to architect and optimize the end state AWS architecture.

AWS SLAs

The AWS services that have SLAs and the SLAs themselves can be found here:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/

http://aws.amazon.com/route53/sla/

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/sla/

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/

Oracle Virtualization on AWS

Oracle has a number of different virtualization offerings: Oracle VM, Oracle VM VirtualBox, and Oracle Solaris Zones being the most prominent. 

Oracle VM can be run on AWS, however, Oracle VM is a "bare-metal" / "type 1" hypervisor so it my does not run on top of an operating system or the Amazon Xen hypervisor.  There are a number of Oracle VM Templates that can be used to deploy an Oracle technical or application stack in minutes. These templates can only be used to deploy to Oracle VM.

The Oracle VM VirutalBox is a type 2 or "hosted" hypervisor which means that it runs on a host operating system.  Therefore, VBox templates can be run on Amazon Xen Linux or Windows instances. 

Oracle Solaris is not supported on AWS so Oracle Solaris Zones (builtin OS virtualization) does not apply.

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop on AWS

Citrix has a number of virtualization solutions. XenDesktop and XenApp are two of them. The main difference between them is that XenDesktop has one individual desktop (and therefore own VM) only for each user and XenApp is a shared desktop model.  The technical difference between the two is that XenApp is based on MSFT Terminal Services and hundreds of users can get virtual apps and desktops from a single VM.  XenApp is fully supported by Citrix on AWS today. 

Citrix XenServer (just like VMWare and MS Virtual Server) will not run on AWS/EC2.  This is the case even though XenSever (as the name implies) is based upon the same open source kernel as AWS hypervisor.

Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) and AWS

Several of Amazon’s partners, including Citrix, AppZero, InstallFree, and Nasstar have built client virtualization (VDI) and application streaming solutions that can be hosted inside Amazon EC2 machine images.    More can be found here: http://cliffdavies.com/blog/xenapp/xendesktop-hosted-shared-desktops-on-amazon-web-services/