If you are new to AWS you’d be forgiven in thinking that all the services you can use are waiting for you in the console. The truth is there are a whole host of services, really useful services, that are not in the console and you have to find other ways of getting to them. This short guide will tell you about some of the ones I’ve used and I’m hoping our wonderful cloud community will add some comments to any I’ve forgotten.
AWS CART
Sounds like something shopping related?
No, this is the AWS Cloud Readiness Assessment Tool. It’s a cut-down public version of a tool that AWS’s Partners and Professional Services consultants have been using for the last decade called the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment.
The aim of the tool is to find out if your customer is ready to move to cloud or not. A move to cloud can be more a cultural shift than a technological one for a business and the CART assessment hopes to draw out any issues so that they can be fixed before a migration to cloud is considered.
The 47 questions it asks are aligned to the excellent AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the idea is that someone is tasked with using the CART tool with as many people within the business (not just those C-suite stakeholders) the result would be a Heatmap and Radar chart, once again, aligned to CAF.
If you are at the start of your cloud journey there are a lot of third party consultancy’s out there who will come along and evaluate you potential Cloud Journey. Save yourself a huge sum of money, become a hero and do it yourself.
AWS Migration Evaluator
This is a real gem. Only available via request from the link below. Squarely aimed at the pre-cloud phase when you’ve agreed that moving to cloud could be a good idea, and you’ve done your CART assessment, and you are just about to start migrating your first application then the CFO asks the dreaded question ‘So, how much is this going to cost?’.
This service has a nice history. Originally developed by TSO logic, AWS decided to purchase the service and call and give it a very generic name, But the functionality was untouched and the service is one of my favourites.
AWS Migration Evaluator will run on a local VM inside your data centre and works by collecting all the details of each VM including what applications are running on each and most importantly the PERFORMANCE of each VM. You’ll need to run this in-place for a few weeks to give you a good view of the performance of your VM’s since some applications only become busy at certain times of the month. With all this information, AWS Migration Evaluator will present you with a very nice Report detailing what EC2 Instance Type you’ll need to be using which will work for you when you migrate.
Since we typically overspec everything then its very surprising the kinds of savings the Migration Evaluator will give you. Typically 30-40% sometimes much higher (I’ve heard 90%).
But there’s more…
If your company has invested in expensive Microsoft SQL Server licenses then Migration Evaluator will take this into consideration and propose Dedicated Hosts to allow you to reuse those licenses, saving you even more.
Got more than VM’s? Migration evaluator can detect physical machine details via SNMP or WMI and there’s an agent to pick up performance data also.
As with every AWS service, there’s some overlap with other services. AWS Migration Evaluator has some overlap with Application Discovery Service.
There are pro’s/con’s with each. I love Migration Evaluators reports and rightsizing benefits, I also love that it integrates with AWS Application Migration Service.
I don’t like the fact that I have to wait for AWS to install it for me.
Application Discovery Service is great, I love that it gives me network information and it integrates well with Migration Hub. I also like that its sitting in the console and I can use it anytime I want.
End of Support Migration Program for Windows Server
It’s a fair bet that the Product Marketing team were doing an offsite when this slipped through the net, but It gets worse. In a bid to abbreviate the longest service name in history they decided on ‘EMP for Windows Server’.
It would be easy to make jokes on the words EMP and Windows Server, but the service does not deserve it. For its very unique use case it’s a pretty great service.
Again, this service was a purchase that AWS made from a third party company and the idea is that it allows legacy applications to run inside a new version of Windows Server. The fixes the problem that companies have of not being able to shutdown a data centre and move all-in to the cloud because there's some poor server in the corner somewhere running an application that is critical but cannot run on newer OS's.
It does this by taking a before and after snapshot while installing the application and then effectivly containerising the application so that it runs on your new Windows Server.
In a move that Migration Evaluator should follow, this service began by being request only but now has a self-service option so anyone can do it.
Great service, fits a common issue and is unfortunatly hidden away so that no one can find it.
Schema Conversion Tool
From a legal perspective, Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) isn’t in the console so I am allowed to add it to this list. However, it is very closing linked to AWS Database Migration Service which is in the console. SCT is one of those rare services that doesn’t have a nice AWS or Amazon prefix.
The idea is that AWS help you move from those expensive commercial database engines to something a lot cheaper running in the cloud. SCT is the tool that helps with that conversion by analysing your current database and suggesting changes to allow it to run on a different target.
Imagine walking into the office one day, migrating those Oracle databases to Postgres, telling your manager that you’ve saved them several million $$$ and walking out at the end of the day, almost certainly in slow-mo.
Of course, it might not be that easy. There would be some functionality you may use in Oracle’s PL/SQL that isn’t present in Postgres’s PL/pgSQL in which case SCT has a library of Lambda functions that potentially can be called to provide that native functionality.
If the idea of running Lambda functions outside of a database fills you with dread then your options are –
1) Stay as you are and help buy Larry another boat.
2) Convert manually. I’m sure you have the time don’t you?.
3) Use some kind of magic real-time conversion thingy.
SCT is a great free tool that can help with certain scenarios. It can be found here
Bablefish for Aurora Postgres
Ok, ok, ok technically this is in the console, but honestly, unless you knew about it already its so easy to miss. I would argue that its intended audience wouldn’t know about it.
Bablefish for Aurora Postgres is the answer to Option 3 above. It is the magic real-time conversion of Microsoft SQL Server databases to be able to run on Aurora Postgres.
AWS launched this way back in 2021 with the setting-themselves-up-for-failure title “Goodbye Microsoft SQL Server, Hello Bablefish.”.
I’ve not checked recently but 3 years on I’m pretty sure that Microsoft SQL Server is still available.
I’ve not used this service-that-became-a-feature in a production environment. I would LOVE to hear from anyone who has. I really would love this service to be brilliant. But I’m guessing that since it never gets mentioned then people have either not tried it for various reasons or perhaps they have tried it and its trash.
My biggest concern would not be one of compatibility but of performance. Please give me your insights !
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