Budget overruns? Try Amazon Database Migration Accelerator

Amazon Database Migration Accelerator (DMA) was launched on 24 June, 2020 by AWS. Initially, AWS offers DMA to customers who are migrating from Oracle and SQL Server to Amazon Aurora or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL or MySQL. In future, Amazon DMA will include additional source and target databases, data warehouses, and analytics systems. Amazon DMA brings together AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT), and AWS database migration experts to help customers migrate away from traditional commercial databases at fixed prices. You can read more at the official Amazon Database Migration Accelerator page.

Ref: Amazon DMA

Amazon DMA vs other migration projects
Other migration projects include a variable cost that depends on the resources used during the migration process. Amazon DMA offers fixed price migrations that you can pay after the migration is done. Hence reducing the risk of budget overruns. In addition to AWS DMS, AWS SCT, and migration experts, Amazon DMA also uses the vast technical knowledge gained by Amazon’s engineers while migrating internal systems to AWS database services. Amazon DMA migration solutions are offered by APN partners (like cloud.in) by allowing you to assemble the right combination of solutions to fit your business requirements. To learn if you qualify, please reach out to cloud.in at sales@cloud.in or visit our contact us page.

Why Amazon DMA from Cloud.in?
Clients have frequently given feedback that traditional database migrations eat up an unreasonable amount of effort and usually result in budget overruns or delays. This is because re-factoring applications from one database engine to another can be time consuming and technically challenging. Engineers working on these migrations require an in-depth familiarity of both the origin and target databases, as well as various programming frameworks. We at Cloud.in have these experienced engineers for your database migration projects.

Feel free to write to us at sales@cloud.in for any further information.

Why it is essential for organizations to adopt an application modernization strategy

Given the scale of digital transformation, it has become imperative for enterprises to find a way to modernize their applications. Legacy applications are built on outdated architectures and typically are characterized by high maintenance costs, inflexibility, and redundant features. If the applications are not modernized, they lose their relevance to the business. Legacy apps also are seldom understood by the current generation of developers as they have been maintained for many decades with or without adequate documentation. The other big challenge is that of unsupported platforms or skills shortage. If the application has been created in an old language, then it becomes extremely challenging to find developers that can support these applications. Organizations that have legacy applications are hence, extremely vulnerable to a fast-changing business environment, and hence need to quickly have a strategy for modernizing their applications.

Options to modernize

There are several ways to modernize an application. Enterprises can choose to encapsulate a legacy application and make it available via an API to other modern apps. They can even choose to rehost the application to another infrastructure (such as the cloud) without making any change to the code. If organizations want to quickly take advantage of the cloud without making any modifications to their applications, then the rehosting option is the preferred option. If enterprises want to take advantage of the scalability of the cloud, then a re-architecting option is recommended. The other option is replacing or completely rewriting or rebuilding the application from scratch.

Why the cloud is the best option

The cloud is the best option from an infrastructure point of view, as it can help enterprises take advantage of several tools available in the cloud ecosystem to modernize an application. For example, a microservices strategy is one of the most common methods for refactoring and breaking down an application into small components called microservices. Another option is containerization, which plays a critical role in the modernization of an app. As containers provide a complete ecosystem for an application with all associated dependencies, they are ideal for running an application in an isolated environment. This makes them well suited to run on any cloud platform.

Cloud service providers such as AWS also provide the underlying database foundation (such as Amazon DynamoDB for quick lookups for user searches or Amazon ElastiCache for in-memory storing and rendering) for delivering cloud-ready applications. Serverless computing capabilities are also possible which allows enterprises to run application code without provisioning. Enterprises can also make use of proven migration tools from providers such as AWS to ensure a successful migration.

Modernizing an application without understanding the base infrastructure on which it is hosted, is not sufficient and can lead to performance issues. Hosting an application on the cloud can help enterprises ensure that their applications scale up to handle millions of users and manage the increasing volumes of data without any problem of infrastructure breakdowns.

By modernizing an application in the cloud, some of the top benefits include:

• Ability to scale infrastructure up or scale down as per user requirements
• Reduced cost and support issues for applications
• Greater functionality at reduced costs
• Ability to incorporate better security features
• Ability to attract quality talent for supporting your application due to cloud

In summary, the question of modernizing an application today is not ‘why’, but ‘when’ as no company wants to miss out on taking advantage of the digital technologies that modern platforms like cloud provide them.

Video and Audio calling from mobile browsers now assisted by Amazon Chime SDK

You can join your web application to Amazon Chime SDK video and audio resources using the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript in your AWS account. You can add support for mobile web by integrating the recent version of the SDK obtainable on npm and updating your application UI for the mobile form factor if you are already using the Amazon Chime SDK in a web application. Now with this feature, you can utilize the Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript to set up video as well as audio calling applications planned for the mobile web. With JavaScript SDK support on Google Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS, you can occupy your clients on their mobile devices excluding the need of a download. When downloading an app is selected, you can design native mobile apps with the Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android. The Amazon Chime SDK is a series of real-time communications elements that developers can utilize to promptly add video calling, audio calling, and screen sharing powers to their individual web or mobile applications. Developers can support the unchanged communication infrastructure and services that power Amazon Chime, an online meetings service from AWS, and provide occupying experiences in their applications.
You can read more about Amazon Chime see the following resources:

• Amazon Chime SDK Features and Pricing
• Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript on GitHub
• Amazon Chime Developer Guide - Using the Amazon Chime SDK