Migration madness: The dos and don’ts of a self-run migration to AWS

Thanks for coming. I saw a lot of you. This is the first time and a lot of you are interested in migrations, which is outstanding. I could not be happier because you came to the right session.

So I am here to share with you that we have a very well worn path to AWS. There have been thousands and thousands of companies that we've helped get from wherever they are to AWS. So you're not in this alone. There are a lot of folks here and a lot of partners in this room that can help you derisk and reduce the risk of making this monumental change.

It's a transformation of not only how you do it but also what you can do with it. And hopefully for those of you that this is your first Reinventor, you're seeing just what's possible and there's, there's quite a bit to take in.

So we start with understanding your why it's really important that you and your organization truly are grounded in why you're going to take on this transformation. Because without a why you're going to lose steam in making this change. And so these are the most popular whys that I hear from customers over the last four years as to why they're taking on this change.

And I'll tell you that cost is normally the first one, it's the most obvious everybody wants to do things in a more cost efficient way and, and we start the conversation with that, but I'll tell you that the, the second most popular reason is business agility. Right? Staff productivity and business agility.

I think everybody in here quick show of hands who has children, who here knows some children who here still acts like a child. I raise my hand because I do. So I'm here to say that the next generation of consumers of products and services, if they can't find your product and service with the tiny screen in their hand, they're never going to buy what you have to offer. And a lot of us need to realize that we have to modernize our products and services and make sure that we're catering to all of the buyers that could benefit from our product and service and who here has customers who are nothing but happy.

All right, you only have the one customer or you're the customer, right? Cause I, one of the things we love about our customers is they're wonderfully dissatisfied no matter what we give them very similar to my children, no matter what i give them, they still want more and your customers are no different.

So your ability to react and provide them what they need is incredibly important to keeping them happy and attracting new ones.

So with agility being one of the top reasons customers want to change how they do it so they can react to those customers. Operational efficiency is a close second. And while when we say optimize or, or cost, we often think of dollars and cents because it's obvious i want to share with you that actually time is probably your most precious resource.

None of you see, i like you. You're, you're not in your head. So you know what i'm talking about. None of you have enough time to do all the things that you need to do.

So how many of you have a project wish list? Everybody has a list of, or to do list whatever you call it, right? Um most of them are more than two pages long and i've never gotten to page two because someone always adds something to page one and can change your priorities.

So i have another quick poll for you. How many of you have more than one? Number one priority? All right. So some of you are laughing. So you get my joke. Number one priority should be singular. Correct? In my 20 plus years in it. I've not met an it leader that has one number one priority. They're always juggling many things which makes things very difficult.

And then there's always somebody in the company who can text them or call or send a slack and change those priorities instantaneously, which keeps you on your toes. And quite frankly, it can be rather frustrating because you're making progress and then you have to stop and you have to go over here and that is something that affects our agility.

It affects our ability to deliver. We've got to find ways to break things up into smaller deliverables so that we can make progress and build momentum inside the organization. And that's a lot of what aws can do for you.

And then the last and certainly not least is reducing risk making a big transformation is a risky proposition. And we want to take all the risk we can out of it so that you go in eyes wide open with all the help that we can bring to the table, giving you the confidence to do what you're about to do so that you can get to this area where you can actually be more responsive to your customers.

And so the first thing that you need to do is, well, actually, that's the second thing, let's the first one is, is know, you're wise, the second is follow up a proven methodology. And so over the last 15 years, we've developed a methodology for migrating from wherever you are. It doesn't matter. We hold no judgment, everybody's made mistakes. We all have to how you get to aws.

So it starts with having a methodology proven best practices, ways again to reduce risk. We have tools to help automate some of these things. Our database migration service has migrated over 200,000 databases by now and climbing. So we have tools to make it easier to get from point a to point b.

We have partners. This room is filled with partners that help reduce the risk, either with tools or uh um system integrators that can help you plan your migration. We've got some seats over here if you want, there's some seats over here. You sure. All right.

Um we have a support model. So once you get into the cloud, your support, what you're supporting is different, how you support is different, you need to adjust how you do things. So we have lots of ways to help you and your team support this new way of doing business because you're gonna change how you respond to your business. You're gonna change what you can do. And that needs to be thought through in a, in a thoughtful way so that everybody's on the same page and is communicating effectively and efficiently, training is absolutely critical.

And so while what you know now is transferable, i would say 80% of kind of the on prem way of doing things, the way you would go about doing things transfers into the cloud, there's still a 20% chance of things that you do need to learn. Security is going to be different some of the networking is a little different, but you're not starting from scratch.

So take a sigh of relief, a deep breath. You're not starting over, you're going to be able to leverage and build on the things that, you know, if you start to take some of our classes or you do any of our certification, you'll see patterns and you'll be able to build on your own knowledge and then quickly and rapidly expand your cloud and aws knowledge absolutely critical for being able to support this new methodology for delivering products and services to your internal and external customers.

And then last and certainly not least we want to invest in your success. So we're going to provide all of these tools, all of these helpers, but we'll also invest in your success in, in a, in a monetary way as well. So help offset some of the costs.

All right. So andy jasse said this famous quote and it is really true that there's no compression algorithm for experience. And the reason we say this is migrations is probably something you've never done before. At least not to aws. And we have a saying internally that we've coined which is yomo.

So i'm sure you've heard of yolo, you only, you only live once yomo is, you only migrate once. So if you do it right, which is what this presentation is all about. We want to make sure that you land successfully and you're equipped to actually support your environment. But this compression algorithm is this muscle is maybe one that you don't have.

So having partners, having experts leveraging us to help guide you through this process, leverage our experience again to reduce the risk and make sure you have a plan that you and your team can execute very critical to actually reducing risk.

So the moral of the story is, don't do this alone at the very least, engage us, engage us, leverage our expertise, leverage our talent, validate your plan with us, engage our partners. We don't want you to treat aws as just another data center. Ok? You can, it's ok if that's your first step. But this is an evolution, this is a journey.

And if you've been in it for longer than say, six days, you know, that things change quite rapidly in this environment and it's never going to be done, your environment will never be done and you will always be modernizing. Even if you're the hottest, start up in the last 33 years, you're going to continue to modernize your infrastructure. And it's really important to have that mindset that you're not actually going to be done.

But your first step is get here, get here as fast as possible because your ability to iterate once you're in aws goes up exponentially, you're able to experiment quicker, you're able to try things, you're able to break things out into microservices. And that's just infinitely harder in the traditional on premise way of doing things.

So we encourage you to not do this alone, leverage us, leverage partners, leverage tools, but don't do it by yourself.

All of us have to justify the money that we spent and we should be justifying the time that we spent. And so we call that making a, a case for change. It's very important to say this is why we're doing things and this is why it makes sense and then have a plan that says this is the time commitment that we're making to make this transition from how we used to do things to this new way of doing things and go in eyes wide open.

It's really important that you understand what you're getting into. And again, we and our partners are here to share and help you discover what is going to change culturally that how you execute and it's going to change again, how you can respond to your business, which is probably the most important thing that's going to change.

You're going to be more responsive, you're going to be able to do more and you're going to be able to do more in a faster time frame, which is what everybody wants to do and then understand your potential, your software licenses.

So we all have expenses and, and it is usually one of the bigger expenses as a line item and who here has been asked to do more with less. I, i've been asked to do more with less for about 20 years and, and for 20 years you have to wonder how much is left. If every year it's less, like, sooner or later there's, there's, there's bound to be not much there. Right.

I think the less is, is do more and less time. Right. If you can do more and less time, if you can make a difference, if you can take your product life cycle, if it was going to take you six months to release a new product and you can bring it in by three months, can you make more revenue in a faster period of time? Can you catch a window in the market faster? Can you go into a new market faster than you ever could before? Those things make a difference to the growth of your business?

So another quiz who here works for a business that's trying to grow. All right. So anybody work for a nonprofit? All right. So you're trying to grow and enlist uh supporters for that. Is that true? Right. Of course, donations and things, right. So you're still trying to grow, but it's a little different and the government is a totally different story. They're not trying to grow.

So we don't have any of those in the room. Oh, you are a even better, not trying to grow but trying to be more efficient. Correct. Absolutely. As we should, all of us all right.

So understanding your potential software licenses, you see, as you walk around expo tons of software that you're probably using on premise that you could be using in the cloud. You may not realize that you're using software that actually runs on top of aws. And once you get to aws, you can simplify your vendor management and your licensing by doing it all through aws via our marketplace.

The other thing you can examine is your cost of licensing. As you're looking at migrating, there are things you can do differently, leverage different databases, you can leverage different licensing models that can actually save you a significant amount of time and money and that's part of putting together your plan.

So having a good understanding and making that case, it may be something that you do as a next step. But having that as part of your plan and part of the logic and the business case can help make the leaders that you're trying to convince get on board with this change in this transformation.

So this is a picture and if you want to take a picture of it, go ahead, i encourage it. It is a mental model of how to get started. So if you're new to aws, you really should get some training and do some proof of concepts and build your confidence. But after you build some confidence and you've all made an investment of time just coming here. So you're you may be past that step.

The next thing is to assess your environment and, and make that case for a change. And we have tools and we have partners that can help you make that business case. Once you have that business case, the other thing that's important is to assess your team's readiness to actually make this jump. Ok. So this is assessing the training needs of your organization.

We've got a skill builder program that can help and investing in your people making sure that they're coming along for this journey is, is very important. Um and then you get into this mobilized phase, this is getting ready. This is really important to understand what all needs to be done. Where are the dependencies? Where do we have to make sure we test for latency and things that are important to our end users. How do we make sure again, we reduce as much risk as possible and are ready to make this migration.

And then finally, it gets to that execution mode and then start to modernize as you go. So this is again, the mental model, each of the phases is really important and you could take groups of applications or servers or whatever. However, you logically break things up, think business units and go through this process repeatedly or you can do it all as one holistic uh project plan really kind of depends on the size and scope of what you're trying to accomplish.

Uh so the six do is go in eyes wide open. And so as part of our assessment phase, we have something called a migration readiness assessment. And this is a survey that we facilitate with you. And we ask you a bunch of questions and we want you to be honest, ok, we want you to be honest because these are the things you may know that you need to spend time on and we want to make sure that those things get documented in the project plan so that you and all of your leaders understand where time needs to be sent in that project plan to be fair.

No one gets all green, no one ever gets all green. That's not the goal. This goal is to actually assess and make sure that you're looking, we're helping you look for blind spots that you may not be aware of based on our vast knowledge of helping customers do this before you. This is incredibly enlightening. Even if you have the utmost confidence in your team, i have the confidence in your team. But this is a way to make sure that we help them be successful.

We don't want anybody to be disappointed. And so this allows us to make sure that that project plan has the necessary components to make sure that we reduce the risk of any of these things. Security being an important one. Governance being an important one, the end support model being an important one. All of those aspects are things you want to think about before you jump into this so that you make sure you have a complete plan that you can go and execute.

Yes. All right. Developing the plan. Super important. Everybody needs to be on the same page. There are dependencies and quite frankly, all of you still have a day job, right? So you have to figure out how do we get this done and still deliver the products and services that we have to do day in and day out again. That's where partners can help out by augmenting. But coming up with this plan is really important and then sticking to it.

How many of you have developed aaa project plan before? Ok. Well, excellent. How many have ever had it go flawlessly? I'm glad you're being honest with me. I never have either, right? So they never go flawlessly, but you need to have a plan. So you can tell when you're off track and so that you can get the right people in the room to get back on track.

So making sure you have a plan and that it's communicated in an effective and an efficient manner really is important. The other thing is important is this a communication tool internally for you. It's also a communication tool for us, right? So this is to make sure we as your partner in this journey. And if you use a third party partner to help you a system integrator of sorts or, or even a tooling provider. It helps make sure we're all on the same page.

If you've ever been in a rowboat and had somebody rowing in a different direction, it makes it really hard to get to where you're going. And again, having this plan allows you to all be on the same page and rowing in the same direction. It does not mean things will go according to plan, but it will make it easier to identify when things are not and then be able to make either adjustments to expectations or adjustments to how we deliver.

Um you want to take this time to assess again what you have and where you want to be after the migration. In truth, about 80% of what comes over comes over as is and about 20% gets adjusted in flight. That's the right mix. The people who try to do too much at once usually delay their project. It ends up being really long and people get really frustrated and those projects have a higher degree of failure rate.

So we encourage you to make the move modernize what makes sense, but move right, get a cadence, get some momentum and, and really understand again what you can do and what you can do differently.

I mentioned this already, but it's important that your team is ready to do this and you invest and encourage them to get the certifications. We have skill builder, we have role based training programs absolutely critical that your people come along for the journey and that you're encouraging them and showing them that you're investing in them, that they're going to continue.

And then last and certainly not least is executive engagement. It is absolutely critical that you take that business case that you rally the troops and i couldn't have said this better and i stole this from, this is 2019 that andy said this at re invent and it still is true today. It set aggressive goals, your team, your leaders, your team can do more than they think they can if you give them the plan and you give them the support that they need and we encourage you to set aggressive goals, get help and just go, go, go so execute as fast as you can but do it with a partner that you trust. Here is the remaining transcript formatted for better readability:

I thank you for your time and attention. I hope you enjoy the rest of the show and uh I'll be available for questions if you have any.

Thanks again.