Lift and Shift to AWS EKS
Migrating Your Applications to Elastic Kubernetes Service
Lift and Shift to EKS is a best-practice and production-ready offering of workflows and tools that guarantees a painless modernisation of your applications and migration into a secure, scalable and performant AWS setup.
The Challenges
Most organisations have on-premises applications burdened with high capital expenses, complex management, scalability challenges, and hardware that needs to be replaced every 3-5 years. Maintaining existing on-premises infrastructure results in increased operational burden and drains IT budgets for businesses already budget and resource strapped.
With these on-premises challenges, enterprise IT organisations want to move to the cloud and Kubernetes has become the standard way for companies to run modern applications at scale. However, businesses looking to modernise applications often find themselves unsure how to start while asking questions like:
Can we migrate our legacy / monolithic applications to Kubernetes?
Should we break our workloads to micro-services before migrating Kubernetes?
What do we need to get started with micro-services?
The Solution – Lift and Shift to AWS EKS
Based on our experience working with customers, the fastest way to modernise existing applications is to first migrate to Kubernetes on a lift-and-shift approach.
Lift-and-shift is the process of migrating a workload from on premise to AWS with little or no modification. A lift-and-shift is a common route for enterprises to move to the cloud, and can be a transitional state to a more cloud native approach. Once the application is up and running on Kubernetes, modernisation can start.
The Benefits of scaling clusters with AWS EKS
The best way to use Kubernetes on AWS is Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). The Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that allows businesses to run and scale Kubernetes clusters in a trusted and cost-effective way. Thus, the benefits of using Amazon EKS include:
Painless access to a modern infrastructure
EKS is a system that knows how to run containerized applications, regardless of their architecture. It is an excellent opportunity to modernize your toolkit and process without changing your application. Thus, it gives businesses access to a modern infrastructure to build the future.
Accelerated application modernization
Modernizing applications without the proper tools and infrastructure primitives is a sure and painful recipe for failure. Migrating to EKS provides access to a robust DevOps tool kit and automation best practices that you can use to modernize workloads successfully.
Increased developer productivity
Providing developers with the tools for shipping code fast and consistently will dramatically improve their productivity.
Improved customer satisfaction
Using a platform like EKS, where you can run both legacy and modern applications, will reduce the number of systems that need to be maintained, reduce human errors, enhance security and save time. This will help you increase customer satisfaction
Reduced operational costs
Amazon EKS customers only pay for what they use, with no hardware or licensing, saving substantial costs while benefiting from the scale, performance, and security of the cloud.
Security and compliance
EKS is fully certified and compliant with security and compliance standards such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, and more. Thus, customers who operate in regulated environments don’t need to certify their control plane against these benchmarks.
Scalability at its finest
Leveraging the global scale of AWS, companies can deploy applications and rapidly scale up to meet their workload requirements. In addition, as your cluster grows, the EKS control plane will dynamically scale up to meet the workload requirements.
The process – 4 steps for migrating to AWS EKS
Technologies that power our AWS EKS offering
The solution makes use of AWS managed services for both Logging and Monitoring. Also, it includes add-ons for RDS and Elasticache, so the burden of managing these components is on the AWS engineering team.
All the components are deployed in an Infrastructure as Code manner using both Terraform (Landing Zone, EKS and add-ons), as well as Helm for everything that is deployed on top of EKS.
To make operations smoother, we installed logging and monitoring agents inside EKS and configured them to automatically connect to OpenSearch and AMP. For CI/CD we chose Argo because of its amazing integration with EKS, and we have also added Falco for intrusion detection. Thus, detection logs are automatically sent to the AWS OpenSearch cluster for analysing and alerting.
How AWS EKS works for our clients
EKS combined with open-source technologies have helped bootstrap our customers’ modernisation efforts in the cloud. Check out some examples of our projects:
Waydev – helps companies worldwide implement an innovative data-driven method of tracking engineers’ output in order to achieve groundbreaking results. Thus, continuous improvement is part of the company’s DNA, constantly investing in new methods to improve customer experience. Currently, they are successfully leveraging EKS and KEDA for their highly auto-scalable processing pipelines.
Otter – has embarked on a digital transformation journey in 2019. They focused on refactoring applications to be cloud-ready and consolidate their infrastructure around AWS. Their highly successful eCommerce stores are powered by Magento deployed on EKS. They also benefit from Istio for its advanced traffic routing capabilities, as well as Argo Workflows for reindexing jobs.
Ready to migrate to AWS EKS?
If you want to learn more about the benefits of migrating your workload to Amazon EKS and the lift-and-shift approach, just book a meeting with one of our AWS EKS Consultants.
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We are an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Firm and the only company headquartered in Romania that holds three AWS Pro Certifications. Our team currently has a total of 23 AWS certifications.