Cloud-to-AWS

migration guide
for startups
Why leading startups move
their workloads to AWS
Overview
Not all startups begin their cloud journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Some
businesses develop a minimum viable product (MVP) on one of the platform-as-
a-service (PaaS) providers that offer compelling benefits, including low friction
and infrastructure simplification. Other startups may amass a landscape of varied
purpose-built workloads across multiple cloud providers.

If you’re exploring or planning on migrating workloads from a non–AWS Cloud

environment to AWS, a strategic considerations framework is a helpful starting point.

This eBook is intended to provide actionable decision support to startup technical

leaders and their teams—with a specific focus on cloud-to-AWS migration use cases.
You will find a top-considerations framework, a clear explanation of what to expect
during a cloud-to-AWS migration, and a set of curated AWS resources to support
you at every step. You will also learn why a diverse set of fast-growing startups have
migrated their workloads to the AWS Cloud to reduce costs, increase security, drive
agility, and innovate rapidly.

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A leadership perspective
Familiarity and avoidance of friction are common reasons why startups initially build on
a first development platform. Other factors include attractive entry pricing, functional
advantage, and founder preference or brand bias. As your startup’s products and teams
grow, so does its cloud landscape. On rare occasions, startups may run IT operations in a
multi-cloud environment, but this is typically the result of leadership turnover or acquisition
activity. In other cases, core startup applications are developed and run on premises or in
collocated environments—due to a preference of engineering teams for security or other IP-
related reasons.

At AWS, we’ve seen that cloud-native startups achieve the best experience, performance,
and cost outcomes when they select a single cloud provider. The multi-cloud approach, while
workable in concept, typically generates undesirable growth in overhead (person-hours, cloud
expense, and technical debt) as a company operates.

Multi-cloud customers often must utilize solutions from multiple providers to provision,
manage, and govern IT resources, monitor the health of their applications, and collect and
analyze data stored in different locations. To help startups overcome these challenges, AWS
has extended its services over the past several years to help these businesses create, manage,
and govern infrastructure and applications hosted in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

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VA L U E P R O P O SI T IO N

Why migrate to AWS?

As the leading cloud provider to startups, AWS and the AWS Partner Network 3. Migration experience and support programs: AWS offers strategic
deliver deep technical expertise in migration and multi-cloud consolidation, and technical support to startups that have workloads hosted with
along with the capabilities of more than 200 fully featured services. That helps other cloud providers or in on-premises infrastructure via programs
explain why 83 percent of the 1,000 startup unicorns worldwide1—and over 90 that deliver total cost of ownership (TCO) results. With the broadest
percent of the Cloud 1002—run on AWS. experience and community of partners and certified individuals, AWS
helps startup customers migrate and meet goals faster—via a network of
Cloud-native startups choose AWS for a variety of reasons. However, across more than 400,000 certified individuals and 100,000 partners globally.
thousands of recent cloud-to-AWS migrations, customers consistently cite
these four unique and compelling advantages for migrating cloud applications 4. Security and compliance support: Startups migrate with AWS to benefit
and workloads to AWS: from the same cloud security posture as large organizations that deliver
mission-critical banking, public health, and safety services. AWS provides
1. Broadest reach: AWS enables startups with broad geographic and direct support and tools that assist in meeting requirements for 98
strategic reach and support through AWS Marketplace APN Global security standards and compliance certifications globally, including PCI
Startup and co-marketing programs. You can increase your total DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171.
addressable market (TAM) to millions of customers, including startups,
enterprises, and public sector organizations, whose data is hosted with AWS. For companies considering a cloud-to-AWS (and on-premises-to-AWS)
migration or multi-cloud consolidation, AWS solutions architects (SAs) and
2. Comprehensive and performant infrastructure: AWS offers startups technical professionals offer the following expertise to guide and inform the
significantly more services and better performance than any other first steps and phases of your project.
cloud provider. Your startup can access industry-leading functionality,
performance, purpose-built silicon, and as-a-service billing without
upfront capital investments in R&D and infrastructure.

AWS re:Invent 2022 Keynote

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AWS re:Invent 2022 Keynote
A planning considerations
framework
Successful cloud migrations don’t happen without a plan. AWS recommends a stepwise
consideration framework comprising three core milestones to help startups stay on course:

1. Inventory your cloud workloads and data

2. Identify the project team and roles

3. Leverage AWS migration support programs

Migration planning is not a task that must (or should) be done in isolation. Your AWS
account (and AWS Partner account) teams have the knowledge and experience needed to
simplify and accelerate your migration journey. Make sure to schedule plenty of in-depth
conversations regarding these areas with your AWS account team and SA. Refer to the
Resources section of this eBook for information on how to contact your teams.

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W H AT A R E YO U M IG R AT I N G ?

1. Inventory your cloud

workloads and data Compute and storage inventory

As you plan your cloud migration and operation, make sure your decisions are data driven. Compute Resources
You will want to obtain hard figures for your current and projected cloud costs with
incumbent providers, projected AWS costs, and migration project options. Service 1 2 VMs Memory

During this assessment phase, your primary objective should be to quickly aggregate data to
CPU specs + Resource
best inform your business case. Taking a complete inventory of your existing cloud compute
and data storage workloads remains the most logical starting point. You can contact your AWS
account team to discuss how to discover, document, and map all your existing applications. Service 2 + Resource

If you are collecting your own data, remember that the output should include a list of
+ Service
services, where they’re deployed (geographically), configuration, utilization metering and
measurement, and current costs. Your project team will use this mapping data to build a high-
level architecture and, ultimately, support your migration business case.

Have additional on-premises or hybrid cloud workloads in scope for cloud migration? See the
Storage Volume
Resources section of this document for links to AWS migration support and pricing tools.

Data warehouse 1 PB + Volume

Fileshare 1 2 TB + Volume

+ Storage

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W H O’S I T G OI N G T O TA K E ?

2. Identify the project team and roles

The ability to move rapidly and pivot quickly is a startup’s inherent advantage over larger competitors. Cloud-to-AWS migration may enable
brand and line extensions, which strategically expand reach. Your engineering teams are busy developing and maintaining products to delight
your customers. Developer involvement in a cloud-to-AWS migration or consolidation may be required and inevitable, but the less that occurs,
the better aligned your resources will be. Three AWS capabilities can play a pivotal role in advancing migration timelines and a positive ROI:

AWS SAs design and deliver solutions AWS Consulting Partners are AWS Support provides hands-
to complex customer business experienced in migrating cloud-native on help with troubleshooting
problems on AWS. As trusted workloads to AWS and can help make issues in your infrastructure,
technical advisors, SAs understand your migration or consolidation a fast-growing service quotas, and
business context, convey best success. These Partners, including training your teams on issues
practices, and provide prescriptive Partner SAs, ensure alignment of of cloud implementation. If
guidance. technical and business objectives you’re running a mission-critical
across phases. AWS Consulting workload on AWS, you will want
Partners may also play a key role to utilize AWS Business Support
in advising you on your startup’s to help with implementation and
eligibility for migration funding troubleshooting. If you’re growing
support. (See the Resources section your business and actively scaling,
of this eBook for insights on it may be prudent to consider AWS
connecting with any of the providers Enterprise Support.
from the AWS Partner Network.)

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H O W W ILL YO U S AV E ?

3. Leverage AWS migration

support programs
AWS is dedicated to helping startups efficiently migrate application and
data workloads from non-AWS platforms to the AWS Cloud. In addition to
technical guidance, we offer migration incentive programs to customers that
meet certain eligibility requirements. Delivering flexible benefit options that
contribute and accrue to reduce TCO, these incentives include everything
from partner funding to credits for service and support.

AWS migration support program incentives help offset the duplicate costs
customarily incurred in enabling two platforms during a migration. The
program can cover partner project costs and provide billing and support
credits. Your AWS account team or AWS Consulting Partner can review
eligibility and help to determine which incentive program is right for you.

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The process demystified
This section demystifies the migration process by outlining a set of first-call discovery questions
and demonstrating how they feed into the migration project sequence.

Once engaged, your AWS account team or AWS Consulting Partner will coordinate a discovery session between you (and your internal stakeholders)
and our SAs. Want to maximize the efficiency of your first call session? Answer this set of 10 core questions:

1. Do you have a full inventory of your compute and storage volumes? 6. How many people are managing the current environment?

2. Which existing applications and cloud services are being migrated? 7. Do you plan to refactor or re-platform your applications?
(List and describe.)
8. Do you plan to migrate ongoing projects for application
3. What are the main business drivers for migrating these workloads? modernization?

4. What is the target timeline for this migration? 9. Do you have an architecture diagram?

5. What is your current downtime and disaster recovery (DR) strategy? 10. List and explain the resource dependencies (specifically, key vault/
microservices).

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Typical project steps for startup cloud migration
Here’s a typical migration project roadmap and along with some of the primary components to consider when moving
workloads to the AWS Cloud.

Cloud-to-AWS migration process

Assess Mobilize Migrate and Modernize

1. Discovery of source assets Data collection and Smaller scope:

2. Compute and storage inventory deep discovery tools Self-service tools

3. Utilization and invoice analysis

Larger scope:
AWS Partner services

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C U ST O M E R ST O R IES

ENPICOM triples
performance and scalability “From the first moment we reached out to
AWS, we were surrounded by an incredibly
by migrating to AWS competent team of people…they wanted to
make the migration successful and help us to
grow our business after that.”

The challenge: Vadim Galaktionov, Head of Software Development, ENPICOM

ENPICOM helps develop new vaccines, leveraging the company’s IGX

Platform, which provides a solution for the analysis of repertoire
sequencing data. Its process involves managing large amounts of data
and gaining insights from samples that typically generate millions of DNA
sequences. A cost-efficient solution for computing power was needed to
allow for high-performance processing to speed its analysis and enable
secure data management.

AWS solution:
Migrating the IGX Platform to AWS was quick and seamless, taking just six
weeks from the initial call to the final cutover and required only a small
team at ENPICOM for management. During the migration, development
work continued as normal, with just a few hours of downtime. The IGX
Platform now runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for
secure and resizable compute capacity. ENPICOM found the support and
documentation provided by AWS to be invaluable.

Read the full story ›

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Numerix cloud migration
accelerates HPC analytics
by 180x
“Our clients are using our risk analytics to
avoid billion-dollar losses. The introduction
of near-real-time analytics with the virtually
limitless scalability of AWS has been a real
The challenge: game changer.”
Numerix, a fintech company, provides its customers with insight into
thousands of possible market scenarios to avoid the negative impacts of Jim Jockle, CMO, Numerix

large market swings. The process creates complexity and consumes costly
and unwieldy computing resources. As its huge client portfolios swelled in
size, it needed to scale its high performance computing (HPC) solution.

AWS solution:
To avoid these costs and increase efficiency, the Numerix team migrated its
HPC analytics solution to AWS and used AWS Batch, which provides fully
managed batch processing at any scale. Now, instead of asking its clients to
invest in CPU cores, Numerix can offer access to an environment that is not
limited by the amount of hardware on hand. Using AWS, the Numerix team
can run calculations that used to take a month in under 40 minutes, which
is near real time for trade and risk management. Although the company
adopted a lift-and-shift approach in the early stages of the migration, the
full migration to a serverless mode was a key milestone.

Read the full story ›

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Carro Group cuts
infrastructure costs in
half with AWS
“With AMS, we don’t have to conduct cost
optimization exercises within the engineering
team. AWS offers its global expertise to
The challenge: speed up that optimization process, so our
engineers aren’t bogged down.”
Carro Group, specializing in the pre-owned car marketplace, was looking
to maintain its lean DevOps and senior engineering support team after Kelvin Chng, Co-Founder, Carro Group

acquiring another used-car marketplace, Jualo. Already relying on AWS for

scalable infrastructure solutions, it realized it could use AWS Managed
Services (AMS) to offload the operations portion of DevOps, allowing its
engineers to refocus their time on development.

AWS solution:

Carro began working with Cloud Comrade, an AWS Premier Consulting

Partner, to migrate Jualo to AWS. Since migrating 40 Jualo servers to
AWS, its availability levels have increased to consistently meet service-level
agreements (SLAs). The team expects that Jualo will continue to average
99.99 percent uptime, even when traffic to the site increases. It has also
benefited from enterprise-grade services with high levels of security and
compliance. Cost-optimization sessions with AWS Certified Solutions
Architects have helped Carro reduce its Jualo infrastructure costs by 50
percent since the migration.

Read the full story ›

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Zego migrates 60 TB of
data to AWS on time and
under budget
“Using AWS, we have everything we need
to push forward and stay ahead in the
fast-moving insurance business.”

The challenge: Bart Swedrowski, Director of Systems Engineering, Zego

Zego, a short-term insurance provider for private-hire and delivery drivers

and couriers, acquired driving telematics company Drivit. Drivit monitors
drivers’ performance constantly to assess safety, collecting 50 data points
every minute, including driving speed, acceleration rates, and braking. To
access this huge quantity of valuable information, it required the rapid and
secure migration from another cloud provider to AWS.

AWS solution:
The team used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and
CLOUDBASIX for RDS SQL Server to migrate five Microsoft SQL Server
and PostgreSQL databases to AWS. It also moved tens of millions of files
(60 terabytes of data) into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3),
an object storage service, so that the data could be classified. The migration
went smoothly, finished within the tight nine-month timeline, and came in
under budget. Since unifying Drivit’s systems with its own on AWS, Zego’s
infrastructure is more reliable and agile while supporting future innovation.

Read the full story ›

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AgriDigital reduces
software deployment
time by 50% with AWS
“We don’t have the downtime issues we had
previously. We can deliver a more reliable
application by being on AWS, so our supply
chain customers can operate with much more
The challenge: confidence that they will deliver products
To reduce risk to global agriculture supply chains and avoid even a few and get paid on time.”
minutes of downtime, AgriDigital provides a commodity management
platform to its customers, including farmers harvesting crops to truck Dominik Moreitz, Head of Engineering & DevOps Lead, AgriDigital
drivers who rely on precise delivery schedules to get those crops to
market. As the company entered the US market and ramped up business
in Australia, it needed greater reliability and easier scalability.

AWS solution:
The AgriDigital team began by leveraging the support of an AWS Advanced
Consulting Partner—the Brisbane-based Itoc—from the AWS Partner
Network. Working with Itoc, AgriDigital chose to migrate its production
environment to the high-performance, platform-agnostic .NET Core on
AWS—liberating its team to move from Windows to Linux. Next, Itoc
migrated AgriDigital’s database environment from Microsoft SQL Server
to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon DynamoDB. AgriDigital is
continuing to modernize its application environment while growing its
business—on a foundation of AWS.

Read the full story ›

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KOHO migrates data
warehouse to AWS for
near real-time analytics
“Using AWS, we can spend the vast majority
of our time helping our users and advancing
the business instead of on scaling the
infrastructure.”
The challenge:
Jonathan Klein, CTO, KOHO
To keep offering a variety of consumer services and innovating on behalf
of its customers, KOHO Financial needed a more cost-effective data
warehouse solution—one that could provide a secure, efficient, and
scalable foundation. The company saw the benefits of migrating its
data warehouse to AWS, including the availability of near real-time data
analytics, simplified data management processes, reduced costs, and
unfettered access to AWS services—all unavailable with its former data
warehousing solution.

AWS solution:
To establish a secure, scalable, and efficient foundation for its data
architecture, KOHO migrated from its legacy solution to Amazon Redshift,
a service that provides fast, easy, and secure cloud data warehousing
at scale. KOHO also decided to build its Instant Pay service using AWS
services—in particular, Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-
compatible relational database built for the cloud. By the end of 2021, as
many as 1,100 users had signed up for Instant Pay, surpassing expectations.
The company also anticipates significant cost savings once the data
migration is complete.

Read the full story ›

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Next steps
Take advantage of these AWS migration startup resources:

• Not an AWS customer yet? Create an account.

• Already an AWS customer? Join AWS Activate for access to free tools, resources, content,
and expert support to accelerate your startup at every stage.
• Access our helpful primer on the roles of your AWS account team members.
• Explore AWS Trusted Advisor for architectural recommendations that can help your teams
follow AWS best practices.
• Connect with an AWS Partner about your migration or other AWS projects.
• Explore your potential costs with the AWS Pricing Calculator.
• Determine your startup’s eligibility for AWS migration programs.
• Learn about opening a support case.
• Considering on-premises-to-cloud migration? Access the Migration Evaluator.

Ready to migrate?
Contact us ›

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