Within Atos I lead an AWS focussed community interested in training, certification and working with AWS technologies with our customers, our AWS Coaching Hub.
I’m keen this community doesn’t use certification as the end of the journey, it’s merely the beginning. Within an organisation like Atos it can be difficult for staff to feel confident having only completed some courses and taken certifications to start working on customer projects. As well as providing support to each other on assignments I’ve also used the AWS Coaching Hub to arrange hands on training where people can get in-depth on AWS services.
I’ve ran a couple of AWS Gamedays, thinking they would help bridge the gap between theory and hands-on. However, what I’ve found is that whilst they were enjoyable, the people who got the most out of them were those with some experience (as they got to further test themselves), whereas those with only some theoretical knowledge (via completing a training course and or certification) struggled and could become a little frustrated. I was looking for something in between to bridge the gap and help people take more confident steps from theory into practice, so arranged an Immersion Day.
AWS offer Immersion Days across a range of topics, and these can be delivered by either AWS. Atos are one such partner who can help deliver these with AWS for customers, but equally being a broad community of 100,000+ employees we also have people within our own organisation who could benefit in participating in one.
Having polled our community to understand which Immersion Days people would be interested in participating in we settled on the Migration Immersion Day as the first one to run. This Immersion day was split roughly 50/50 between theory and practical. We started the day talking through the migration process.
Starting from the initial application discovery and business case preparation.
We went through to the mobilise phase where application discovery and planning, development of AWS Landing Zone to host the migrated workloads, development of operating models and people / teams (a lot of cloud projects have non-technical challenges / barriers to overcome), along with some proof of concepts to inform and iterate.
Finally we went through the migrate and modernise phase, talking about how to migrate applications, how to manage them in the cloud, and crucially for my money the modernise and optimisation work as it’s so important to make sure people understand a basic simple re-host / lift and shift styled migration is the end of the beginning of the journey, and many of the benefits of elasticity, availability and offloading the ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’ aren’t made until you’ve modernised. Really important that key stakeholders understand this….. Again APN Partners like Atos can help with with all of this.
Once we’d completed the theory we got our hands dirty migrating a unicorn themed company’s(yes another Unicorn theme!) web application from on premise to AWS, utilising the AWS Database Migration Service to migrate the MySQL Database, and used Cloud Endure to migrate the Web server (note there were also options for extending the day to include migrating the web tier to Containers or Elastic Beanstalk and then optimisation to add security, refactor components etc.).
The migration architecture using DMS over the internet, of course most customers in reality would us a VPN and / or Direct connect
The CloudEndure Migration architecture also used the internet as a data path, of course most customers in reality would us a VPN and / or Direct connect
An example refactored, optimised workload with additional security services
Summary
The AWS Migration Immersion Day was a good way point on a cloud retraining journey for people with little / no hands on experience. It fills a gap between theoretical training and either being out working with the AWS platform, or the chaos of an AWS Gameday. The Immersion Day covered broadly the topics, although depending on the role you undertake day to day you may find some of it more or less useful. If you have people who operate end to end they’ll get something from the whole day, if you tend to have people with defined job roles (typical in a large organisation) you may find some people get more from the first part of the day (the business case, application analysis type work), than the second part of the day (the hands on engineer work of actually doing what someone’s ‘sold’). If you want to focus on particular areas it’s worth making that known upfront to see if any tailoring can be done.
The AWS migration Immersion Day can be viewed here, including how you can set-up and run one yourself — https://application-migration-with-aws.workshop.aws/en/intro.html
