Best practice to migrate VM's from digital ocean to AWS

[fzs]

Most of the VM's are application and web servers and we don't have backend any backend or API services hosted on DigitalOcean. The applications running on the VM's are independent of each other.

1. Update TTL value to less than 1 minute on your existing DNS configuration for your applications.
   
   
2. Backup your existing application and data directories as zip/tar files.
   
   
3. Backup/Image each VM.
   
   
4. Import your images into AWS:
   • If you have a compatible VM image, then use the AWS Import/Export service to bring in your VM image to get converted to an EC2. (Refer: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vm-import/)
     
   • You can also start new EC2 instances and try replicating the data over manually using something like Rsync.
     
   • If your instances all have a similar base configuration, then create new EC2s and configure your new base machine and then use AMIs to duplicate them. Then just copy the data directories over.
     
     
5. Test your new instances and applications on it individually.
   
   
6. If you have databases, now would be a good time to ensure you setup some kind of replication with the one on AWS being the slave and the one on DO being master.
   
   
7. Create new DNS Zone in Route53 and create new records with TTL of less than 1 minute and use the the Weighted Routing Policy to create same records as you already have in your existing DNS configuration with 100% weightage going to it.
   
   
   
8. Update your Name Servers at your domain end to point them to route53 Name servers.
   
   
9. Test to see if the new Route53 records are propagated and check to see f your existing application environment on DO is working fine.
   
   
10. Now, add new records that point to your new EC2s and give them about 10% weightage and test to see if you are hitting the new servers and if it working as expected (This assumes you tested the systems green on step 5).
    
    
11. Slowly increase weightage to the EC2s till it is 100%.
    
    
12. Done.
    

Alternatively you could forget almost all of the above steps except the backups & DNS and go with AWS Server Migration Service: https://aws.amazon.com/server-migration-service/