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.

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.

Amazon CloudFormations and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder

Yesterday I blogged about AWS AMIs and Oracle VM templates. These are great mechanisms to stand up an initial cloud environment. However, they don't provide the capability to manage, provision and update an environment once it is up and running. This is where AWS Cloud Formations and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder comes into play. In a way, these tools/frameworks pick up where AMIs and VM templates leave off.


Once again, there a similar offers from AWS and Oracle that compliant and also overlap with each other. Let's start by looking at the definitions:


AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.


AWS CloudFormations




Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder - Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder makes it possible for administrators to quickly configure and provision entire multi-tier enterprise applications onto virtualized and cloud environments.


Oracle VM Builder




As with the discussion around should you use AMI or VM Templates, there are pros and cons to each:


1. CloudFormation is JSON, Assembly Builder is GUI and CLI


2. VM Templates can be used in any private or public cloud environment. Of course, CloudFormations is tied to AWS public cloud