

Ask HN: Consultancy helping migrate a large CMS-Intrastructure to AWS? - scoopa2

We're leaving our managed hosting provider where we pay &#62;5000 USD per month on long term contracts to move our infrastructure to AWS.<p>Our plan is to move our servers to a VPC. All the static files are already on S3 and the application is modified accordingly.<p>When you migrate to a VPC its fairly important to choose wisely which subnet plan you are using as it is difficult to change that later. And the subnets determine in which availability zone the servers are in.<p>The transition will be complicated and as we're running a high-availability site with 5 Mio Uniques we would like to help a consultant with our migration.Amazon "recommends" some "Solution Providers":<p>https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers?selection=service_type_id&#38;service_type_id=6&#38;type=si<p>Have you worked with any of the companies or have tipps for good consultants in this area?<p>Has anyone made bad experiences using AWS VPCs?
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cd34
I think you need to catalog just what you're paying for with your current
provider. If you're running on bare metal machines and performance is your
requirement, you're going to require more vertical scaling on AWS. If you are
paying for boxes that are underutilized, then, you might find running on AWS
to be cheaper.

You also have the advantage of AWS scaling and the ability to do things you
probably cannot do with your existing host. First and foremost, if you're
moving to AWS, make sure you can split your services into multiple
availability zones. A lot of people got burned when they put their entire
company in separate deployments within the same availability zone.

Is price your only motivation to move? If so, ask your current provider to
renegotiate. Have quotes from two competing providers so show them that you
have investigated other providers that appear to offer a better deal.

I don't know what your company does, but, unless you have a ton of hardware
you're really not utilizing, simply moving to the cloud isn't a silver bullet
for cost savings. Things don't run the same way and there is definitely a
different paradigm to implementation. You will likely spend a lot of your cost
savings, if any, in re-engineering your current processes to better fit the
cloud.

Are you hiring people at your company to maintain the AWS installation? Your
current programmers/engineers are going to need to deal with things in a
different light. If you just hire a consultant to transition, when things
break, is your current team going to have enough insight into how things work
to be able to diagnose or fix things when things go wrong?

There are things to outsource, but, if your current team doesn't understand
AWS, the first time you have a problem, you're going to be back on the phone
with the consultant that moved it.

