This guide describes seven areas that you should focus on when you replatform commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and in-house applications in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The guide also provides strategies, tools, and AWS services to help you replatform application components. COTS applications are third-party applications that are ready-made and can be purchased in a commercial market (for example, AWS Marketplace). In-house applications are developed and used internally by your organization.
After you decide to migrate your COTS or in-house applications to the AWS Cloud, you must evaluate which of the seven common migration strategies (7 Rs) to use. These strategies are refactor, replatform, repurchase, rehost, relocate, retain, and retire. We recommend that you replatform applications that use components or databases that reached, or are close to reaching, their end-of-support (EOS) date. EOS is when a vendor withdraws technical support for a product. If you choose to replatform an application in the AWS Cloud, you can benefit from the following capabilities:
Automate in-place operating system (OS) upgrades with AWS Systems Manager.
Use snapshot storage volumes to quickly create Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
Create a private subnet to isolate workloads that run on outdated operating systems (OSs).
Use high-speed networking to rapidly replicate production environments for testing the replatforming.
Quickly set up a separate application stack with on-demand EC2 instances, without using additional on-premises hardware.
