This whitepaper is for historical reference only. Some content might be outdated and some links might not be available. # Phase 3 - Gaining momentum and optimization Phase 3 - Gaining momentum and optimization ## Programs Programs Once you have garnered a certain level of maturity and have begun advancing your cloud journey beyond initial pilots and migrations, your organization will be able to take advantage acceleration and cost savings programs. ### Migration Acceleration Program Migration Acceleration Program The [AWS Migration Acceleration Program](https://aws.amazon.com/migration-acceleration-program/) (MAP) is designed to help enterprises committed to a migration journey achieve a range of these business benefits by migrating existing workloads to AWS. MAP has been created to provide consulting support, training and services credits to reduce the risk of migrating to the cloud, build a strong operational foundation and help offset the initial cost of migrations. It includes a migration methodology for completing legacy migrations in a methodical way, as well as robust set of tools to automate and accelerate common migration scenarios. By migrating to AWS, enterprises can focus on business innovation instead of dedicating time and attention to maintaining their existing systems and technical debt. Sacrifices and painful trade-offs no longer have to be made to get something to market quickly. Enterprises can focus on differentiating their business in the marketplace and taking advantage of new capabilities. ### MAP methodology MAP methodology The [Migration Acceleration Program](https://aws.amazon.com/migration-acceleration-program/) consists of a three-step approach for migrating to AWS that includes the following: + **Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) phase** — As discussed earlier, the MRA phase determines the current state of your readiness to migrate and identifies areas where you already have strong capabilities and where further development is needed to migrate at scale. The MRA is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and evaluates cloud readiness along eight dimensions (landing zone, operating model, security and compliance, migration process experience, skills and center of excellence, migration plan and business plan). The MRA typically involves a one-day workshop conducted by AWS and/or a MAP Partner. + **Migration Readiness & Planning (MRP) phase** — During the MRP phase, you will team with AWS Professional Services and/or a MAP Partner to build the foundation for a large-scale migration and gain experience migrating and operating several workloads on AWS. AWS and MAP partners have developed a prescriptive methodology and approach based on best practices gleaned from hundreds of customer migration projects that significantly reduce time to migrate while lowering cost and risk. To prepare a cloud operational foundation, you will follow an agile approach with workstreams for cloud center of excellence, landing zone, operation model, and security and compliance. In addition, AWS will work with you to develop a strong migration plan and compelling business case that articulates the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for a cloud migration. At the end of this phase, which is usually completed in 2-4 months, you will be ready to migrate at scale. + **Migration phase** — In the Migration phase, you will complete the migration plan developed during the MRP phase, typically with the assistance of AWS Professional Services and/or a MAP Partner. A key component is establishing a *migration factory* composed of teams, tools and processes to streamline the movement of workloads from on-premises to AWS. The migration factory teams work through a prioritized backlog of workloads based on migration patterns identified in the portfolio discovery and planning process. Where possible we apply known migration and operational patterns to accelerate the movement of workloads, reduce risk and improve the final outcome. With this approach, you will quickly start to achieve the business benefits of lower operating costs and gaining agility and scalability. Once in the cloud, you can focus on optimization of applications, processes, operations and costs. This phase typically takes 12-24 months to complete. ### Experience-based Acceleration Experience-based Acceleration (EBA) Experience-based Acceleration (EBA) is a transformation methodology designed to help customers accelerate cloud adoption and create sustained momentum for modernization initiatives. EBA brings together the right combination of cloud experience, change management principles, and AWS experts to help customers unblock cloud adoption. Enterprises and governments have leveraged EBA methodology for their strategic migration and modernization initiatives. EBA delivers acceleration workshops and activities called *EBA Parties*. These workshops align an organization, accelerate decision-making, create new processes, impart training, and change the way people work. EBA sprint-based activities (virtual and in-person) are called *parties*, because they are self-contained. They invite representatives from every part of an organization and the hands-on experience is rewarding and fun. Each party has a purpose and brings together specific resources, decision makers, and experts to solve distinct challenge. The sequence of planned EBAs depends on your customer needs: 1. **Assess** — **Cloud Acceleration Workshop** — The Cloud Acceleration Workshop is an AWS facilitated activity that develops a critical-path roadmap for cloud adoption. Importantly, as part of the process, the activity aligns leader stakeholders, business objectives and known success patterns for enterprise transformation and how to work efficiently and quickly through the roadmap. 1. **Platform Party** — **Stress test your AWS Landing Zone ** — Utilizing the Cloud Adoption Framework, the Platform Party is a sprint based, three-day interactive event designed to accelerate the validation of the AWS Landing Zone and the development of the required operating and governance models. This party facilitates identification of needs and blockers to remove in order to get to a full-functioning production platform. Resolving these blockers is often problematic in regular working environments. The Platform Party will facilitate accelerated problem solving, with relevant stakeholders present to resolve points of friction and align to best practices suitable for your environment. 1. **Migration Party** — **Migrate three applications in three days** — The Migration Party is a sprint-based, interactive workshop designed to accelerate application migration. Using AWS CAF, the Migration Party builds on your AWS Landing Zone and focuses on the development of customized patterns that enable your organization for rapid lift and shift or re-factor migrations, operational and governance scaling, and developing a pipeline for applications that are candidates for migration and automation. This workshop is designed to migrate 3-5 applications to AWS in three days and identify blockers and resolve them with cross functional resources. 1. **Modernization Party** — **Transform applications and build new workflows** — The Modernization Party targets customer needs to re-architect applications and business workflows; containerize and/or breaking down applications into micro-services (deconstructing the monolith); and building cloud native applications. Similarly structured to a Migration Party, the Modernization Party utilizes AWS CAF, moving data and workflows to cloud – but as part of re-architecting applications or building net-new capability. 1. **People Party** — **Build your Cloud Enablement Engine (aka CCOE)** — The People Party is a two-day interactive workshop designed to enable an enterprise’s ability to create, sustain and govern the change that occurs to accelerate cloud adoption. AWS experts will work with your organization to build and grow your initial cloud team responsible for strategy and operations. AWS starts with the needs of your internal customer, discussing existing organization structures, current constraints, key roles for delivering value, and map skills and roles to future needs in the context of hiring. Experience-Based Accelerators (EBAs) are a leading AWS customer program designed to provide *learn-by-doing* workshops that help large enterprises experience new ways of working, communicate, ignite initiatives, and remove barriers to internal transformation. EBAs are immersive engagements that change the way customers work – from legacy siloed teams to cross-functional empowered teams; from waterfall project-based focus to iterative product-based completion; long-lead analysis to bias for action. For each EBA engagement, cross-functional customer teams and AWS SMEs are collocated for 3-5 days, focused on delivering specific outcomes and starting their transformation journey. # Continuous optimization Continuous optimization [Continuous optimization](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/continuous-optimization/) is an iterative process where we implement a set of simple, high-impact cost reduction methods across all applications, and then measure and report the cost savings results. The process is then repeated on a regular cadence. Following are two essential tenets of continuous optimization: + **Tenet 1: Cost optimization is not a project, it’s a way of life**. AWS is never finished with continuous optimization. It is integrated into existing operating procedures, and AWS works to improve the process every cycle. The process is designed to be low-cost and low-overhead. Within those limitations, continuous optimization is designed to find out exactly what level of super-optimization is possible. How inexpensively can we run each application? is the question to be answered + **Tenet 2: Focus on big impact / low effort**. Each optimization idea should be ranked by its impact/effort ratio, and ideas should be implemented starting from the top of the list and progress downward until reaching a point where the effort exceeds the impact. This line will be drawn in a different place by different organizations, and can change over time to suit the business priorities. ## The continuous optimization process The continuous optimization process The following are three categories of optimization along with several examples of each. ### Category 1: Remove Category 1: Remove These are the easiest ideas that produce the most cost savings. 1. **Remove unused applications** — Determine whether the application is really needed. If not, delete all infrastructure and data associated with it. 1. **Remove unused instances** — Look for instances that are no longer used, and then shut them down. [AWS CloudWatch Metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/working_with_metrics.html) can be a useful starting point to discover idle instances. 1. **Remove unused storage volumes** — Volumes unattached from instances (orphan volumes) are almost never needed any longer. A helpful policy is to require that needed orphan volumes have a tag specifying who needs it and why it is needed. Verify that they’re not needed and remove them. 1. **Remove unused snapshots** — Storage and instance snapshots accumulate when there isn’t an active process to remove them. Determine what is needed and remove the rest. 1. **Reallocate or sell unutilized reserved instances** — AWS Cost Explorer is a great tool for finding unused RIs. Either move an on-demand instance to an instance type that is covered by an RI or resell them on the [Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/). ### Category 2: Resize Category 2: Resize Everything that can’t be deleted should be evaluated to ensure it isn’t over-provisioned. 1. **Resize instances** — Use Amazon CloudWatch Metrics to determine which instances can be downsized. 1. **Resize storage volumes** — Look at storage volume utilization and reduce any unnecessary free space. Re-evaluate any overgenerous free space policies that were carried over from on-premises. It’s possible to be far more efficient with storage in AWS. 1. **Reduce performance of storage volumes** — Use Amazon CloudWatch Metrics to determine if Provisioned Input/Output Operations Per Second (PIOPS) volumes can be detuned or moved to less expensive non-PIOPS volumes. ### Category 3: Refactor Category 3: Refactor This category should be done less frequently, as it takes more effort and is less likely to produce results after the first pass. However, the first pass will likely produce significant results, so this step should be done at least once. After that a quarterly or annual review is a reasonable cadence. Look at each application and ensure that the architecture is as efficient as possible. If needed, ask your AWS account team to perform an AWS Well Architected Review. Managing costs in AWS can be a simple and productive process. Experiment with these ideas and invent new ones. # Core services and additional services Core services and additional services AWS consists of many cloud services that you can use in combinations tailored to your organizational needs. To access the services, you can use the AWS Management Console (a simple intuitive user interface), the Command Line Interface (CLI), or Software Development Kits (SDKs). For more information, see the [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/introduction.html](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/introduction.html) whitepaper. ## Core services Core services Core cloud capabilities are those that most applications will require simply to run. Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including [compute](https://aws.amazon.com/products/compute/), [storage](https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/), [databases](https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/), [analytics](https://aws.amazon.com/products/analytics/), [networking](https://aws.amazon.com/products/networking/), [mobile](https://aws.amazon.com/mobile/), [developer tools](https://aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/), [management tools](https://aws.amazon.com/products/management/), [IoT](https://aws.amazon.com/iot/), [security](https://aws.amazon.com/products/security/), and [enterprise applications](https://aws.amazon.com/enterprise/). These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. Compute, storage and networking are core and critical to just about every application – old and new. Most customers should look to these first to get an application up and running on AWS. AWS is a platform that offers both core cloud capabilities and the services that enable them to evolve as they move along their cloud journey. AWS provides building blocks that you can assemble quickly to support virtually any workload. With AWS, you’ll find a complete set of highly available services that are designed to work together to build sophisticated scalable applications. You have access to highly durable storage, low-cost compute, high-performance databases, management tools, and more. All this is available without up-front cost, and you pay for only what you use. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. AWS is trusted by the largest enterprises and the hottest start-ups to power a wide variety of workloads, including web and mobile applications, game development, data processing and warehousing, storage, archive, and many others. With so many capabilities, the key for AWS and customers is in understanding where such breadth has value and where depth in capability is important. ## Additional services Additional services The second group of services are those that customers may choose to use depending on their requirements. Many customers want to experience some of the basic capabilities of such products and services to experiment and test new solutions. By offering such a broad scope of advanced solutions, from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to internet of things (IoT), networking, and content delivery, AWS makes it easy for customers to evolve and experiment. But sometimes, customers need additional support to leverage new technologies (see the **[AWS Professional Services](aws-professional-services.md)** section). More importantly, they do so without having to go outside of the familiarity and existing contractual relationship that the organization has with AWS, for all (at the time of this publication) 176 services. This is where breadth has greater value over depth. We are not just talking about customers adding new features to solutions, any of the capabilities of AWS help organizations with their entire application lifecycle. For example, AWS supports multiple technology stacks – just about any technology stack – and this is very powerful. The benefit is that the flexibility of AWS means these third-party tools can be used with applications running on AWS. # Leveraging new technologies (AI/ML/analytics) Leveraging new technologies (AI / ML / analytics) AI/ML help organizations differentiate from their counterparts. Customers want to build new AI/ML capabilities across every facet of their business, which will drive the next wave of adoption to the cloud. This will propel our customers to put more of their data and core workloads on AWS. AWS makes it easier than ever for our customers to gain insight from their data using machine learning. Our ML services continue to grow, which is why we have tens of thousands of customers using AWS machine learning. Machine learning is a top priority for many customers. It can drive increased customer or citizen experiences, more efficient organizational operations, and faster, more accurate decision-making. For a long time, the technology was limited to a few major tech companies and hardcore academic researchers. Things changed when cloud computing entered the mainstream. Compute power and data became more available, and machine learning is now making an impact across every industry. It is moving from the periphery to being a core part of every business and industry. When customers choose a cloud provider, up to 50% of their decision is based on their assessment of the AI and ML capabilities of providers. This decision has a ripple effect that will influence their choice for data, compute, analytics, and management services. AWS offers the broadest and deepest set of [machine learning services](https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/#Explore_AWS_Machine_Learning_services) and supporting cloud [infrastructure](https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/infrastructure/?c=ml&sec=int), putting machine learning in the hands of every developer, data scientist and expert practitioner. See [Machine Learning on AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/). For example, [Amazon SageMaker AI](https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/) is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy ML models at scale. It removes the complexity from each step of the ML workflow so you can more easily deploy your ML use cases, anything from predictive maintenance to computer vision to predicting customer behaviors. Pre-trained AI services provide ready-made intelligence for your applications and workflows to help you improve business outcomes — based on the same technology used to power Amazon’s own businesses. You can build AI-powered applications without any machine learning expertise. AI services easily integrate with your applications to address common use cases such as personalized recommendations, modernizing your contact center, improving safety and security, and increasing customer engagement. Because AWS uses the same deep learning technology that powers Amazon.com and AWS ML services, you get quality and accuracy from continuously-learning APIs. And best of all, AI services on AWS don't require machine learning experience. # Two pizza teams, from Ops to DevOps Two pizza teams, from Ops to DevOps One simple rule for maximizing team effectiveness. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has this rule: no team meeting should be so large that two pizzas can't feed the whole group. This is, of course, a shorthand method for ensuring that, as is often the case with big groups, no one's ideas get drowned out. Bezos believes that no matter how large your company gets, if you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, that team is too large. The reasoning behind it is quite straightforward. More people = more of everything. More coordination, more bureaucracy, more chaos – basically, everything that slows things down. Individual performance suffers and people become less engaged. The smaller the team the better the collaboration. Collaboration is very important, as software releases are moving faster than ever. A team’s ability to deliver software can be a differentiating factor for your organization against your competition. Image a situation where a new product feature needs to be released or a bug needs to be fixed. You want this to happen as quickly as possible so you can have a smaller go-to-market timed. You don’t want the transformation to be a slow-moving process. Communication between the teams is important as we move toward the shared responsibility model and start moving out of the siloed development approach. This brings the concept of ownership in the team and shifts their perspective to look at this as an end-to-end project. Your team should not think about your production environments as black boxes where they have no visibility. Cultural transformation is important, as you may be building a common DevOps team. Another approach is that you have one or more DevOps-focused members on your team. Both of these approaches introduce shared responsibility in to the team. DevOps is the combination of cultural, engineering practices and patterns, and tools that increase an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity and better quality. Over time, several essential practices have emerged when adopting DevOps: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure as Code, and Monitoring and Logging. This highlights AWS capabilities that help you accelerate your DevOps journey, and how AWS services can help remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with DevOps adaptation. AWS also highlights how to build a continuous integration and delivery capability without managing servers or build nodes, and how to leverage Infrastructure as Code to provision and manage your cloud resources in a consistent and repeatable manner. + **Continuous Integration** is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. + **Continuous Delivery** is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. + **Infrastructure as Code** is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control, and continuous integration. + **Monitoring and Logging** enables organizations to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user. + **Communication and Collaboration** practices are established to bring the teams closer and by building workflows and distributing the responsibilities for DevOps. + **Security** should be a cross cutting concern. Your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and related services should be safeguarded and permissions of least privileges should be set up. To make the journey to the cloud smooth, efficient, and effective, technology companies should embrace DevOps principles and practices. These principles are embedded in the AWS platform. They form the cornerstone of numerous AWS services, especially those in the deployment and monitoring offerings. + Begin by defining your infrastructure as code using the service AWS Cloud Formation or [AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)](https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/). + Next, define the way in which your applications are going to use continuous deployment with the help of services like [AWS CodeBuild](https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/), [AWS CodeDeploy](https://aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/), [AWS CodePipeline](https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/), and [AWS CodeCommit](https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/). + At the application level, use containers like [AWS Elastic Beanstalk](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/), [Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)](https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/?whats-new-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.postDateTime&whats-new-cards.sort-order=desc&ecs-blogs.sort-by=item.additionalFields.createdDate&ecs-blogs.sort-order=desc), or [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/?whats-new-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.postDateTime&whats-new-cards.sort-order=desc&eks-blogs.sort-by=item.additionalFields.createdDate&eks-blogs.sort-order=desc), and [AWS OpsWorks](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/) to simplify the configuration of common architectures. Using these services also makes it easy to include other important services like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing. + Finally, use the Dev Ops strategy of monitoring such as [Amazon CloudWatch](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/), and solid security practices such as [IAM](https://aws.amazon.com/iam/). With AWS as your partner, your DevOps principles bring agility to your business and IT organization and accelerate your journey to the cloud. For more information, see the [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/introduction-devops-aws/introduction-devops-aws.pdf#introduction](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/introduction-devops-aws/introduction-devops-aws.pdf#introduction) whitepaper.