- [Alex] In this section, we're going to be focusing on the assessing phase of the migration process. I'm going to be walking you through the steps you'll need to take to perform a migration readiness assessment. Now, there are three goals for the assessment phase. First, is to understand where the organization is in its cloud journey. Are you using cloud services already? Are you all on premises? Secondly, to identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses from a cloud-readiness perspective. Basically, how easy will it be to move your code into the cloud? Lastly, we want to create an action plan to fix the identified gaps. No one wants to pause mid-migration to fix foundational issues with the application. So let's dive into that first step, understanding where the organization is in its cloud journey. Most folks don't jump straight into migrating their most important application to the cloud. They usually start small, picking a new project, or an existing application with low value or importance, as the first candidate for migration. You could think of it like the experimentation phase. Have you tested anything out? If you have, what's gone well, and what didn't? Be sure to investigate outside of your team, as some of your coworkers might have some valuable experience they can share with you. Now, if you haven't started a project, what's stopping you? What roadblocks have you identified? Once you've had a chance to play around, experiment, and have gotten your hands dirty, the next step is to start laying the foundation for the work that's to come. This is going to focus on creating the infrastructure that your other architecture will rely on. Do you need a VPN connection to your on-prem network? How about Direct Connect? Will you have to migrate your Active Directory server? How about setting up the auditing tools that your security team will use? You're laying the foundation for all of the architecture that you're going to be building. Now that we've got the first two steps done, it's finally time to migrate. Once the foundation is up, it becomes much easier to get it done. This is from both a technical standpoint, as well as a political one. The needed infrastructure is there, and other folks in the company have had a chance to see how well it runs. This is going to set you up well to start more complicated migrations of older applications, rather than focusing on simply new deployments or simplified resources. Okay, so we've ran some tests, we've built the foundation, and we've migrating some existing resources. Now, it's time to reinvent our architecture. This is where you get to ask your yourself the big questions. What compute instances can I replace with serverless architecture? Where do containers fit into my environment? Can I reduce my reliance on unmanaged architecture? Those are just some of the many questions that you get to look forward to in the cloud. Now we can't get ahead of ourselves too much. I'm always excited about the reinvention stage, but before we get there, we also need to complete a strengths-and-weaknesses review to determine how ready we are to move. Now, I know what you're saying: Alex, I love really long meetings with my management and executive teams. Well, you're in luck, because that's exactly what you get to do. This meeting is going to need to include some of the senior stakeholders in your organization. This could be the CEO, CTO, CIO, security leaders, senior network engineers, and really, anyone else who's in charge or manages part of the IT organization. So, what are you going to talk about in this meeting? Well, AWS has over 70 questions available to help you through this assessment process. Question number one, what is your favorite ice cream flavor, and why is it rocky road? (audience laughing) Okay, seriously, we're not going to go through them all, and I might have made that first one up, but for a full list of where to find all the questions, please check the documentation link for this lesson. At the end of this extremely fun and enjoyable meeting, you should have a pretty good idea as to what the state of your architecture currently is. What strengths have you identified? What areas of opportunity are there? This process is not meant to point fingers for the current state of your resources, but to help you create a plan to move forward. Now that you've completed the migration readiness assessment process, it's time to present these findings. This needs to be made available to everyone in the IT organization to ensure that they're all on the same page. Any areas of opportunity that have been identified need to be assigned to a point person to handle. It's also important to continually check in with each team that has an action item from the MRA. Everyone needs to be rowing in that same direction. Well, this about covers the strategy behind the MRA process. Now, we're not ready to move past the assessing phase, as we've got some tools to learn about that can assist us with the discovery process that we're working through. Now, thanks for going through this content with me, and we'll see you in the next lesson.
