Choosing a migration tool for rehosting databases

Mike Kuznetsov and Harpreet Virk, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

June 2022 (document history)

When you plan to migrate your large workloads to AWS, we recommend that you follow AWS guidance and split your migration process into three stages: assess, mobilize, and migrate. The migration journey involves many factors, including scope (“what?”), strategy (“why?”), and timeline (“when?”), as discussed in Strategy and best practices for AWS large migrations. Each workload you choose to migrate might follow a different migration strategy, as defined in seven common strategies (7 Rs). Most workloads follow the rehost scenario for lift-and-shift migrations. After you select a strategy, you can address the question “how?”, which focuses on at least three aspects (people, technology, and processes).

This guide is for anyone who is planning to migrate their on-premises workloads to the AWS Cloud, including IT and business executives, program and project managers, product owners, and operations and infrastructure managers.

This guide focuses on the rehost migration path, which involves moving an application to the cloud without making any changes to take advantage of cloud capabilities. For example, migrating your on-premises Microsoft SQL Server database to SQL Server on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance in the AWS Cloud is a rehosting strategy. More specifically, the guide discusses tools best suited for lift-and-shift migrations of workloads that have databases included in their scope, and factors to consider when selecting a particular service for the migration. It answers questions such as: Which service best supports database migrations? Could the service used for non-database servers be used for database servers as well, or should database servers be treated differently? What if my rehost migration turns into a mixed approach of rehosting and replatforming?