Maximizing Efficiency: The Importance of AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment

AWS has been helping customers migrate and modernize their Microsoft workloads for over 14 years....

... and has the broadest portfolio of services, programs, and expertise to accelerate the transformation of key applications that power businesses. If you use AWS to migrate and modernize, you can look forward to the following benefits: 

• Unlock innovation – Moving from a traditional monolithic architecture to a cloud-based microservices architecture can give you the freedom to adapt and experiment quickly, so that your organization can unlock innovation faster. AWS has the broadest set of container technologies, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Fargate. Additionally, AWS has the most mature serverless offering (AWS Lambda), deeply integrated .NET support, DevOps utilities to automate development cycles, several open-source integrations, and purpose-built databases such as Amazon Aurora to power modern architectures.
• Reduce costs – You can avoid paying for expensive Windows or SQL Server licensing by moving to open-source database solutions. For example, Aurora provides the same functionality as commercial databases at one-tenth the cost. If you move to DevOps and use containers and serverless solutions, you can reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) and maximize compute consumption.
• Improve security –  AWS offers 230 security, compliance, and governance services and key features - five times more services than the next largest cloud provider. You can use AWS Directory Service, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, to improve your cloud security and eliminate the need to synchronize or replicate data from your existing Active Directory during migrations. You can also use AWS Identity Services to manage identities and permissions at scale, while providing flexible options for where and how you manage your information. 
• Improve the price and performance of your processing power – AWS is a leader in processing innovation, offering Graviton2-based instances that are 20% less expensive per hour than Intel x86-based instances, with up to 40% better performance. Aurora also brings five times the throughput of standard MySQL and three times the throughput of standard PostgreSQL. This performance is on par with commercial databases, at one-tenth the cost.

Every migration starts with an assess phase, to help you understand the state of your organization’s readiness to move to the cloud - without guessing and assumptions. The AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA) is a good instrument to assess and optimize current on- premises and cloud environments, based on actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies.