The first decisions are structural: Which workloads will be migrated and in what order, and what will remain where it is. Next come account structure, networking, access management, and cost limits. Proceed carefully here, as mistakes in these areas are time-consuming to correct later.

We therefore begin by assessing your current environment and defining a target architecture, after which we migrate in stages. For a single application with no special requirements, an experienced team can handle the migration on its own. The more services, dependencies, and compliance requirements are involved, the sooner it’s worth seeking support from experienced DevOps teams.

Generally speaking, no. We first migrate operations and then optimize where it makes financial sense. A complete rebuild is the exception and only makes sense if the existing architecture is the actual cost driver. At FMAdata, we optimized and migrated an infrastructure that had evolved over the years, rather than replacing it.

That depends on four factors: the number of services and their dependencies, the size of the databases, how much downtime is acceptable, and whether the existing infrastructure has already been documented in code. After conducting an assessment, we’ll provide you with a range of estimates and the steps involved before you make your decision.

We check the following areas to see if AWS costs can be optimized:

• Right-sizing: Instances, databases, and volumes that are oversized for the workload
• Unused resources: active test environments, unassigned volumes and IP addresses, old snapshots
• Pricing models: Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for consistent workloads, Spot Instances for interruptible workloads
• Data transfer: Traffic between zones and out of AWS—an often-overlooked cost item
• Storage classes: Data unnecessarily stored on expensive storage

We’re happy to advise you on cost optimization. If it turns out that your workload profile isn’t a good fit for AWS at all, we’ll let you know.

The flexibility of AWS comes with an equally significant level of complexity. The challenge here is to maintain a comprehensive overview, both in breadth and depth, of the various options and components involved in operating infrastructure. This requires extensive experience with the technologies in use and, specifically, with their implementation on AWS.

Operating infrastructure in the AWS cloud requires constant monitoring and maintenance to ensure optimal performance, security, and cost control.