A global manufacturing company operates a critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on-premises. The application is highly sensitive to latency and requires high availability. The company wants to migrate this application to AWS while minimizing downtime during the migration and ensuring business continuity. The current database is a commercial relational database. What is the MOST appropriate strategy for migrating this application and its database to AWS?
- AMigrate the application to AWS Outposts and the database to a self-managed database on Outposts.
- BRe-architect the application to a serverless microservices architecture and migrate the database to Amazon Aurora Serverless.
- CRe-platform the application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and migrate the database to Amazon RDS using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with Change Data Capture (CDC).
- DPerform a 'lift-and-shift' migration of the entire application and database to EC2 instances using AWS Server Migration Service (SMS).
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Re-platform the application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and migrate the database to Amazon RDS using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with Change Data Capture (CDC).
Re-platforming the application to Elastic Beanstalk provides managed compute while retaining application architecture. Migrating the database to Amazon RDS with DMS in CDC mode allows for minimal downtime by continuously replicating changes from the on-premises database to RDS, enabling a cutover with very little interruption.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. AWS Outposts keeps resources on-premises, which doesn't fully migrate to AWS and may not address the scalability and managed service benefits sought by moving to the cloud itself.
- B. Re-architecting is a significant effort and carries higher risk and downtime during the migration phase, which contradicts the 'minimizing downtime' requirement.
- D. Lift-and-shift with SMS is good for quick migration but doesn't leverage AWS managed services fully, and database migration would still need careful planning for minimal downtime.
Database Migration Service (DMS) with CDC
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) can migrate databases to AWS with Change Data Capture (CDC) to keep source and target databases synchronized during migration.
- Supports homogeneous and heterogeneous database migrations.
- CDC enables continuous replication, minimizing downtime during cutover.
- Ideal for migrating critical applications requiring high availability.
Memory trick: DMS with CDC is like a real-time mirror, reflecting changes during migration.