Introduction

In today's fast-paced, high-tech landscape, the way businesses handle the discovery and utilization of their digital media assets can have a huge impact on their advertising, e-commerce, and content creation. The importance and demand for intelligent and accurate digital media asset searches is essential and has fueled businesses to be more innovative in how those assets are stored and searched, to meet the needs of their customers. Addressing both customers’ needs, and overall business needs of efficient asset search can be met by leveraging cloud computing and the cutting-edge prowess of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Use Case Scenario

Now, let's dive right into a real-life scenario. An asset management company has an extensive library of digital image assets. Currently, their clients have no easy way to search for images based on embedded objects and content in the images. The company’s main objective is to provide an intelligent and accurate retrieval solution which will allow their clients to search based on embedded objects and content. So, to satisfy this objective, we introduce a formidable duo: the vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, along with Amazon Rekognition. The combined strengths of Amazon Rekognition and OpenSearch Serverless will provide intelligent and accurate digital image search capabilities that will meet the company’s objective.

Architecture

Architecture Overview

The architecture for this intelligent image search system consists of several key components that work together to deliver a smooth and responsive user experience. Let's take a closer look:

Vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless:‍

1. The vector engine for OpenSearch Serverless serves as the core component for vector data storage and retrieval, allowing for highly efficient and scalable search operations.

Vector Data Generation:

1. When a user uploads a new image to the application, the image is stored in an Amazon S3 Bucket.
2. S3 event notifications are used to send events to an SQS Queue, which acts as a message processing system.
3. The SQS Queue triggers a Lambda Function, which handles further processing. This approach ensures system resilience during traffic spikes by moderating the traffic to the Lambda function.
4. The Lambda Function performs the following operations:

               - Extracts metadata from images using Amazon Rekognition's `detect_labels` API call.

               - Creates vector embeddings for the labels extracted from the image.

               - Stores the vector data embeddings into the OpenSearch Vector Search Collection in a serverless manner.

                - Labels are identified and marked as tags, which are then assigned to .jpeg formatted images.

Query the Search Engine:

1. Users search for digital images within the application by specifying query parameters.
2. The application queries the OpenSearch Vector Search Collection with these parameters.
3. The Lambda Function then performs the search operation within the OpenSearch Vector Search Collection, retrieving images based on the entities used as metadata.

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Advantages of Using the Vector Engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless

The choice to utilize the OpenSearch Vector Search Collection as a vector database for this use case offers significant advantages:

1. Usability: Amazon OpenSearch Service provides a user-friendly experience, making it easier to set up and manage the vector search system.
2. Scalability: The serverless architecture allows the system to scale automatically based on demand. This means that during high-traffic periods, the system can seamlessly handle increased loads without manual intervention.
3. Availability: The managed AI/ML services provided by AWS ensure high availability, reducing the risk of service interruptions.
4. Interoperability: OpenSearch's search features enhance the overall search experience by providing flexible query capabilities.
5. Security: Leveraging AWS services ensures robust security protocols, helping protect sensitive data.
6. Operational Efficiency: The serverless approach eliminates the need for manual provisioning, configuration, and tuning of clusters, streamlining operations.
7. Flexible Pricing: The pay-as-you-go pricing model is cost-effective, as you only pay for the resources you consume, making it an economical choice for businesses.

Conclusion

The combined strengths of the vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless and Amazon Rekognition mark a new era of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and heightened user satisfaction in intelligent and accurate digital media asset searches. This solution equips businesses with the tools to explore new possibilities, establishing itself as a vital asset for industries reliant on robust image management systems.

The benefits of this solution have been measured in these key areas:

• First, search efficiency has seen a remarkable 60% improvement. This translates into significantly enhanced user experiences, with clients and staff gaining swift and accurate access to the right images.
• Furthermore, the automated image metadata generation feature has slashed manual tagging efforts by a staggering 75%, resulting in substantial cost savings and freeing up valuable human resources. This not only guarantees data identification accuracy but also fosters consistency in asset management.
• In addition, the solution’s scalability has led to a 40% reduction in infrastructure costs. The serverless architecture permits cost-effective, on-demand scaling without the need for hefty hardware investments.

In summary, the fusion of the vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless and Amazon Rekognition for intelligent and accurate digital image search capabilities has proven to be a game-changer for businesses, especially for businesses seeking to leverage this type of solution to streamline and improve the utilization of their image repository for advertising, e-commerce, and content creation.

If you’re looking to modernize your cloud journey with AWS, and want to learn more about the serverless capabilities of Amazon OpenSearch Service, the vector engine, and other technologies, please contact us.

We are thrilled to announce that Cloudtech, a leading provider of cloud-based serverless solutions, has achieved the prestigious AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program. This notable accomplishment showcases our expertise in delivering cutting-edge search and analytics solutions using the AWS OpenSearch service.

The AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program

The AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program recognizes AWS Partners who possess technical proficiency, architectural expertise, and a successful track record of delivering projects utilizing the AWS OpenSearch service. Cloudtech’s achievement in this program underscores our commitment to delivering high-quality serverless cloud solutions to our valued clients.

What is AWS OpenSearch Service?

Formerly known as Amazon Elasticsearch Service, AWS OpenSearch Service is a managed, highly available, and fully compatible search service that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of the OpenSearch engine. Built on the popular Elasticsearch open-source project, AWS OpenSearch Service provides a seamless and feature-rich search experience, enabling businesses to index, search, and analyze vast amounts of data with ease.

Scalability and High Availability

AWS OpenSearch Service offers unmatched scalability, allowing businesses to handle any volume of data without worrying about infrastructure provisioning or performance bottlenecks. With the ability to horizontally scale clusters, organizations can effortlessly accommodate growing workloads, ensuring uninterrupted search functionality even during peak usage. Additionally, AWS OpenSearch Service ensures high availability by automatically replicating data across multiple Availability Zones, minimizing downtime and improving system resilience.

Robust Search and Analytics Capabilities

One of the primary advantages of AWS OpenSearch Service is its powerful search and analytics features. The service supports full-text search, enabling businesses to perform complex queries across large datasets and retrieve relevant results with lightning speed. With support for advanced search capabilities like fuzzy matching, faceted search, and geospatial queries, organizations can unlock valuable insights hidden within their data. Moreover, AWS OpenSearch Service seamlessly integrates with popular analytics tools like Kibana, empowering users to visualize and explore data through rich dashboards and visualizations.

Easy Integration and Data Ingestion

AWS OpenSearch Service simplifies the process of ingesting data from various sources into the search engine. It supports numerous data ingestion mechanisms, including bulk indexing, real-time streaming, and integrations with other AWS services like AWS Lambda and Amazon Kinesis. This flexibility allows businesses to ingest data in real-time, ensuring that the search index remains up-to-date and aligned with the latest information.

Security and Compliance

AWS OpenSearch Service places a strong emphasis on data security and compliance. It integrates seamlessly with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), enabling granular access control and ensuring that only authorized users can interact with the search infrastructure. Additionally, the service provides encryption at rest and in transit, ensuring that data remains protected throughout its lifecycle. AWS OpenSearch Service is also compliant with various industry standards and regulations, making it suitable for organizations with strict compliance requirements.

Cost-Effectiveness and Pay-as-You-Go Model

AWS OpenSearch Service follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where organizations are billed only for the resources they consume. This approach eliminates the need for upfront investments in hardware or infrastructure, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, the managed nature of the service reduces the operational overhead associated with self-hosted search deployments, enabling teams to focus on leveraging search capabilities rather than managing infrastructure.

At Cloudtech, we pride ourselves on our dedicated team of cloud architects and engineers who possess extensive knowledge of the AWS platform. Their expertise, combined with our successful implementations of AWS OpenSearch solutions across diverse industries, allows us to optimize your search capabilities, improve data exploration and analysis, and drive better decision-making for your organization.

As an AWS Consulting Partner, Cloudtech has a strong foundation in delivering cloud-based solutions that drive digital transformation. Our achievement in the AWS OpenSearch Service Delivery Program further solidifies our position as a trusted provider of serverless cloud solutions.

We extend our gratitude to our valued customers and partners for their ongoing support and trust in our capabilities. Cloudtech remains committed to empowering your organization with cutting-edge cloud technologies and delivering exceptional results.

Let’s Connect

To learn more about how Cloudtech can help optimize your search and analytics capabilities using the AWS OpenSearch service, please contact our team of experts at opensearch@cloudtech.com. Visit our website cloudtech.com to explore our comprehensive range of cloud-based solutions.

Thank you for being a part of Cloudtech’s journey to excellence

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We are pleased to announce that we have achieved Amazon Service Delivery designation for AWS API Gateway Service, recognizing that Cloudtech Inc follows best practices and has proven success delivering AWS services to end customers.

This is a small achievement in a long list of goals for Cloudtech Inc as it differentiates Cloudtech Inc as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that provides specialized demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in delivering API Gateway Services. To achieve this designation, Cloudtech Inc passed a rigorous technical validation performed by AWS Partner Solutions Architects who are experts in this service. They review prior case studies and architecture to ensure all the best practices are implemented in the project. Earlier We earned AWS Service Delivery Designation for Lambda Delivery. As an AWS Lambda Service Delivery Partner, Cloudtech Inc provides services and tools to help customers build or migrate their solutions to a microservices architecture running on serverless computing, allowing them to build services and applications without the need for provisioning or managing servers.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for startups to global enterprises. To support these solutions’ seamless integration and deployment, AWS established the AWS Service Delivery Program to help customers identify APN Consulting Partners with deep experience in delivering specific AWS services.

As an AWS API Gateway Service Delivery Partner, Cloudtech Inc will provide tools and services to help customers build, secure, and manage APIs, and API-driven architectures, at any scale.

Cloudtech Inc is always happy to help you at any time,  if you have any queries or questions, you can schedule a free call with our representatives and they will guide you further.

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Did you know the disaster recovery solution market is projected to reach USD 115.36 Billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 34.5%, according to this research report conducted by market intelligence company, StraitsResearch?

What do you think is causing it to rise?

Because disasters can strike anywhere and anytime, regardless of their type (natural, artificial, or technical failures). Experiencing losses due to unexpected disasters can be challenging for your business. That’s why most organizations, from SMEs to large corporations, are considering developing a cloud-based IT Disaster Recovery Plan to ensure their business runs smoothly in the event of a catastrophe. Rather than turning to traditional disaster recovery methods, these businesses prefer to use cloud-based solutions. Many market players offer cloud-based disaster recovery strategies, but AWS cloud is one of the top cloud service platforms. Because it provides various disaster recovery strategy options for small to large business organizations, you can select strategies according to your business industry, requirements, and budget.

In this article, you will get information about disaster recovery plans & strategies, and checklists available on the AWS cloud.

Why do you need cloud-based disaster recovery strategies?

Disaster recovery refers to the process of preparing and recovering from a disaster. You must always be ready to manage unplanned adverse events to run your business smoothly. That’s why you need to plan, strategies, and test cloud-based disaster recovery strategies. Cloud-based disaster recovery strategies provide solutions implemented in the cloud with the help of a specific cloud service provider. Read below 3 points to know its importance more precisely:

• You can save your security budget by investing in an entire disaster recovery site and paying as per use.
• You can access and recover any on-premises and cloud-based software and applications in case of a disaster in seconds from the cloud.
• You can minimize downtime and data loss along with on-time recovery.

These reasons would help you to know the rising demands of cloud-based disaster recovery strategies among business industries.

Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Implementation of any strategy requires a plan and checklist. You must also make a disaster recovery plan and tick mark the essential checklist to implement any cloud-based disaster cloud strategy. Generally, this plan must be part of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), which ensures business continuity during and after disasters.

The following 3 tasks will make things easy for you regarding adopting the cloud-based DRP.

Task 1: Know your infrastructure

Your first job is to understand your existing IT environment and assess the data, assets, and other resources. You must know everything, like where data has been stored, the cost of these data, and possible risks. Evaluation of the risks and threats can help you understand the possible types of disasters that might happen.

Task 2: Conduct a business impact analysis and risk assessment

Your next job is to do business impact analysis to measure the business impacts of disruptions to your workloads. Simply put, find out the business operations constraints once disaster strikes. Additionally, do a risk assessment to learn the possibility of disaster occurrence and its geographical impact by understanding the technical infrastructure of the workloads. Don’t forget to consider these two essential factors:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – It refers to the maximum time (acceptable delay), an application can stay offline after the disaster to its recovery.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – It refers to the maximum time (adequate time) for which you can bear data loss from your application. In other words, find the lost time between service interruption and the last recovery point.

Look at the below image to understand these factors more easily:

Image credit: Amazon AWS

Task 3: Know your workloads to implement disaster recovery in the cloud

Implementing disaster recovery on on-premise is different from implementing it in the cloud. To execute cloud-based disaster recovery effectively, you need to analyze your workloads. You must check your data centre connectivity if you have already deployed the workload on the cloud.

But, deploying your workloads on the AWS cloud would benefit disaster recovery implementation. AWS will take of everything from data center connectivity to providing fault-isolated Availability Zones ( an area to support physical redundancy), and regions.

• Go for a single AWS Region if you have high workloads, as you will get different availability zones.
• Go for multiple AWS Regions if there is a possibility of losing various data centers far from each other.

Disaster recovery strategy options in AWS Cloud

The rising popularity of AWS is happening because of more than 20 AWS services available for disaster recovery. But every business has its objective, background, and technical infrastructure. Thus, you should know all options. AWS Cloud offers four major approaches for disaster recovery, shown in the following image:

Image: Disaster Recovery Approaches

Let’s understand each approach and all available AWS services within each approach.

(1) Backup & Restore

Backup & Restore is a common approach for disaster recovery. Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Mitigate data loss and corrupted data
• Replicate data to AWS regions
• Mitigate lack of redundancy for workload deployed to a single Availability Zone

What you need to consider

• Use Infrastructure as code (IaC) for deployment, and for this, consider AWS CloudFormation or AWS Cloud Development Kit.
• Develop a Backup strategy using AWS Backup
• Create Amazon Ec2 instances using Amazon Machine Images
• Automate redeployment using AWS CodePipeline

Available AWS Services

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshot
• Amazon DynomoDB backup
• Amazon RDS snapshot
• Amazon EFS backup
• Amazon Redshift snapshot
• Amazon Neptune snapshot
• Amazon DocumentDB

Check the following image to understand the backup and restore architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Backup and restore architecture

(2) Pilot Light

Pilot light is a second approach for disaster recovery through replication (continuous, cross-region, asynchronous). Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Helps you to replicate data from one Region to another region
• Allows you to work on your core infrastructure and quickly provision a full-scale production environment through scaling servers and switching on

What you need to consider

• Automate IaC and deployments to deploy core infrastructure at one place and across multiple accounts and Regions
• Use different accounts per Region to offer the highest level of security isolation and resources

Available AWS Services

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Replication
• Amazon Aurora global database
• Amazon RDS read replicas
• Amazon DynamoDB global tables
• Amazon DocumentDB global clusters
• Global Datastore for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
• For Traffic Management
• Amazon Route 53
• AWS Global Accelerator

Check the following image to understand the Pilot Light architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Pilot Light architecture

(3) Warm Standby

The warm Standby approach focuses on scaling. Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Ensure the scaling and fully functional copy of the production environment in another Region
• Offers quick and continuous testing

What you need to consider

• Scaleup everything which needs to be deployed and running
• Since it is similar to the Pilot Light approach, consider factors, RTO & RPO for selecting one from these.

Available AWS Services

• You can use all AWS services mentioned in the above two approaches for data backup, data replication, infrastructure deployment, and traffic management.
• Use AWS Auto Scaling for scaling resources

Check the following image to understand the Warm Standby architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Warm Standby architecture

(4) Multi-site active/active

Multi-site active/active approach offers disaster recovery in multiple regions. Check the following table to learn more about it:

What it does

• Helps you to recover data in various regions
• Reduce recovery time but also offer a complex and expensive approach

What you need to consider

• Don’t forget to test the disaster recovery to know how the workload responds to the loss of a Region
• You need to work more on maintaining security and avoiding human errors

Available AWS Services

• Like Warmup Standby, you can use all AWS services mentioned in the above three approaches for data backup, data replication, infrastructure deployment, and traffic management.

Check the following image to understand the Multi-site active/active architecture on the AWS cloud.

Image: Multi-site active/active architecture

How to choose a suitable strategy

It would be best if you made the right decision by selecting the appropriate strategy according to the business requirements. Still, consider the following points and check to decide the best one:

Points to consider

• AWS divides services into two categories – the data plane to offer real-time services and the control plane to configure the environment. It is suggested that you should go with data plane services to get maximum resiliency.
• Choose the Backup & Restore strategy options if you need only backup of workloads and restorage with the single physical data center. Besides this requirement, you can choose from rest 3 strategies.
• The first 3 approaches are active/passive strategies which use an active site like AWS Region for hosting and serving and a passive site (another AWS Region) for recovery.
• Regular testing and updating of your disaster recovery strategies are vital. You can take the help of AWS Resilience Hub to track your AWS workload.
• Use AWS Health Dashboard to get up-to-date information about the AWS service status. It provides a summary like the below image:

Image: Dummy data on AWS Health Dashboard

Tick-make this checklist for your DRP and strategies implementation

Here is a checklist that can help you to effectively design, develop, and implement disaster recovery plans and strategies. Consider it like a questionnaire for successful implementation:

Have you figured out recovery objective (RTO / RPO)?Have to found the stakeholder lists which needs to update once disaster strike?Have you established the essential communication channels during and after disaster events?Have you collected all business operations and IT infrastructure documents?Have you defined any procedure to manage incidents or actions?Have you performed testing of your strategies? Use AWS Config for monitoring the configurations.Does your documentation are up-to-date?

Case study – How Thomson Reuters got benefits after implementing AWS cloud-based disaster recovery approach

In 2020, Thomson Reuter, a Global news and information provider, depended on the traditional Disaster recovery process, which was time-consuming and expensive. The company realized the need for modern cloud-based disaster recovery to improve data security and recover applications for one of its business units. They connected with Amazon AWS and AWS partner Capgemini and decided to implement AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to minimize data loss, downtime, fast recovery, and on-premises recovery. In 10 months, the company implemented this strategy on 300 servers. The automation of the cloud-based DR process provided them with the following outcomes:

• Replicated over 120 TB of data from 300 servers
• Setup a recovery site in the cloud
• Eliminate its manual DR process
• Optimized spending on its DR process
• Enhanced security and data protection

See the below image to understand how AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery works. It is visible that it follows the simple process of recovering and replicating any data. In this case, the company also leveraged this work, but before that, they built an AWS Landing Zone to set up a secure and multi-account AWS environment to meet the security requirements. Afterward, they set up a recovery site in the cloud using the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery service. This new solution has started offering continuous data replication at minimum costs.

Image: Working of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Closing Thought

AWS cloud is not only used by this company but by many other companies as well for disaster recovery. With AWS cloud disaster recovery, you can make a quick recovery with minimal complexity, lower management overheads, and simple or repeatable testing. Analyze your requirements, and decide what disaster recovery strategy is best for you. With the right decisions, you can get these benefits for your business’s growth and smooth operation

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Irrespective of your business size, you can’t ignore the value assessment of any product or service you plan to purchase. The right investment in the right system, process, and infrastructure is essential for success in your business. And how can you make the right financial decisions and understand whether “X” product/service is generating value or not for your business?

Total Cost of Ownership or TCO analysis is one method that can help you in this situation, especially if you are planning to analyze these costs on the cloud. Amazon’s AWS is a leading public cloud platform offering over 200 fully featured services, including AWS TCO analysis -a service to analyze the total costs of an asset or infrastructure on the cloud. It offers services to diverse customers – startups, government agencies, and the largest enterprises. Its agility, innovation, safety, and several data centers make it comprehensive and adaptable.

Read on to learn more about the TCO analysis and how AWS TCO analysis works.

What is TCO analysis?

As the name suggests, TCO estimates costs associated with purchasing, deploying, operating, and maintaining any asset. The asset could be physical or virtual products, services, or tools. The TCO analysis’s primary purpose is to assess the asset’s cost throughout its life cycle and to determine the return on investment.

Regarding the IT industry, TCO analysis consists of costs related to hardware/software acquisition, end-user expenses, training, network, servers, and communications. According to Gartner, “TCO is a comprehensive assessment of IT or other costs across enterprise boundaries over time.”

TCO analysis in Cloud

The adoption of cloud computing in business also raises the trend of TCO analysis on the cloud. You can call it, cloud TCO analysis, which performs the same job on the cloud. TCO analysis in the cloud calculated the total costs of adopting, executing, and provisioning cloud infrastructure. When you are planning to migrate to the cloud, this analysis helps you to weigh the current costs and cloud adoption costs. Not only Amazon, but other big tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, IBM, and many more, offering TCO analysis in the cloud. But, Amazon’s AWS is the number one cloud service provider to offer cloud services.

Why do businesses need AWS TCO analysis?

A TCO analysis helps to know whether there will be profit or loss.

Let’s understand it with an example showing how AWS TCO analysis helped the company increase its profit. The top OTT platform, Netflix, invested $9.6 million per month in AWS Cost in 2019, which would increase by 2023. According to this resource, it would be around $27.78 million per month. The biggest reason behind this investment is the profit, and AWS TCO analysis is helping them to know how this profit is happening. AWS helped Netflix to get a cost-effective and scalable cloud architecture horizontally. It also enabled the company to focus on its core business – video streaming services. You all know that Netflix is the favorite video streaming platform globally.

In another example, delaying the decision of TCO analysis ignorance resulted in a loss. According to this report on 5GC, TCO analysis has been done regarding the adoption of the 5G core. It has been found that postponing increases the TCO over five years. It indicates the losses occurred due to ignorance of TCO analysis.

These examples show that your business needs both TCO analysis and cloud infrastructure. A lack of TCO analysis might cause incorrect IT budget calculations or purchasing of inappropriate resources. It might result in problems like downtime and slower business operations. You can understand that the TCO analysis is a critical business operation. Its ignorance directly impacts financial decisions. Thus, know this and utilize AWS TCO analysis for your business success.

How does AWS TCO Analysis work?

AWS TCO analysis refers to calculating the direct and indirect costs associated with migrating, hosting, running, and maintaining IT infrastructure on the AWS cloud. It assesses all the costs of using AWS resources and compares the outcome to the TCO of an alternative cloud or on-premises platform.

AWS TCO Analysis is not a calculation of one resource or a one-step process. To understand how it works, you need to know the costs of your current IT infrastructure, understand cost factors, and how to optimize cloud costs when you deploy and manage scalable web applications or infrastructure hosted on-premises versus when you deploy them on the cloud.

Here are steps to help you understand how AWS TCO analysis works:

Preliminary steps – Know the current value and build a strategy

Step 1 – Evaluate your existing infrastructure/ web application cost

You must calculate and analyze the direct and indirect costs of your existing on-premise IT infrastructure. Perform the TCO analysis of this infrastructure, including various components.

• Physical & virtual servers: They are the main pillars in developing the infrastructure
• Storage mediums: Cost of database, disks, or other storage devices
• Software & Applications: The analysis finds the cost of software and its constant upgrades. It also estimates the costs of acquiring licenses, subscriptions, loyalties, and vendor fees
• Data centers: The analysis needs to check the costs of all linked equipment such as physical space, power, cooking, and racks with the data centers
• Human Capital: Trainers, consultants, and people who run setups.
• Networking & Security system: Find out the costs of these critical components

Don’t limit yourself to estimating only direct/indirect costs. Find out any hidden costs that might happen due to unplanned events like downtime and opportunity costs, which might be helpful in the future.

Step 2 – Build an appropriate cloud migration strategy

You must choose an appropriate AWS cloud migration strategy before calculating monthly AWS costs. Amazon offers many TCO analysis migration tools, such as CloudChomp CC Analyzer, Cloudamize, Migration Evaluators, etc., from AWS and AWS partners. It can help you to evaluate the existing environment, determine workloads, and plan the AWS migration. It provides excellent insights regarding the costs, which can help you to make quick and effective decisions for migration to AWS.

Primary step – Estimate AWS Cost

Know these cost factors

All industries have different objectives and business operations. Thus, their cost analysis differs according to AWS services, workloads, servers, or methods of purchasing other AWS resources., the cost depends on the working usage of services and resources.

Still, you must consider the following factors directly impacting your AWS costs.

• Services you utilize: AWS offers various computing services, resources, and instances with hourly charges. It will bill you from when you launch any resource/instance until termination. You will get other options to use predetermined set costs for making reservations.
• Data Transfer: AWS charges for aggregated outbound data transfer across services according to a set rate. AWS does not charge for inbound or inter-service data transfer within a specific region. Still, you must check data transfer costs before launching.
• Storage: AWS charges for each GB of data storage. As per consumed storage classes, you need to understand the cost analysis. Remember that cold and hot storage options are available, but hot storage is expensive and accessible.
• Resource consumption model: You get options to consume resources. Such as on-demand instances, reserved instances that give discounted prepay options for on-demand instances, and AWS saving plans.

Know how to use AWS Pricing Calculator

Once you analyze your compute resources and infrastructure to deploy, understand these factors, and decide on necessary AWS resources, you need to use AWS Pricing Calculator for expected cost estimation. This tool helps determine the total ownership cost. It is a web service that is freely available to end-users. It permits you to explore services according to need and estimate costs.

Look at the below image to see how this calculator works. You have to add required services, configure them by providing details, and see the generated costs.

Credit: Amazon AWS Pricing Calculator

You can easily add the prices according to a group of services or individual services. After adding to the calculator, check the following snap-shot of the configuration service (EC2 service). You have to provide all required information such as location type, operating system, instance type, memory, pricing models, storage, and many more.

Credit: Amazon AWS Pricing Calculator

The best part is that you can download and share the results for further analysis. The following image is a dummy report to know that you can estimate the monthly cost, budget, and other factors with this summary.

Credit: Amazon AWS Pricing Calculator

Note: Check this link to know various factors for pricing assumptions.

Know how to optimize cloud costs on AWS

Calculation on AWS is not sufficient; you need to optimize your cost estimation. AWS offers various cost optimization options to manage, monitor, and optimize costs. Here are some tools you can utilize to optimize your costs on AWS:

Tool nameKey CharacteristicsAWS Trusted Advisor

• Get recommendations from this tool to follow the AWS best practices to improve performance, security, & fault tolerance
• Can help you to optimize your cloud deployment through context-driven recommendation

AWS Cost Explorer

• Provide you with an interface to check, visualize, and manage AWS costs and usages over time
• Features like filtering, grouping, and reporting can help you to manage costs efficiently

AWS Budgets

• Use this tool to track your costs and improve them for better budget planning and controlling
• You can also create custom actions that help prevent overages, inefficient resource usage, or lack of coverage

AWS Costs & Usages Report

• Leverage this tool to track your savings, costs, and cost drivers.
• You can easily integrate this report with an analytics report to get deep analysis
• It can help you to learn cost anomalies and trends in your bills

How Airbnb used AWS Cost & Usage Report for AWS cost optimization

A community marketplace, Airbnb, based in San Francisco founded in 2008. The community has over 7 million accommodations and over 40,000 customers. In 2016, Airbnb decided to migrate all operations to AWS to scale their infrastructure automatically. It worked, and in just 3 years, the company grew significantly and reduced its expenses through different AWS services (Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, etc). In 2021, the company utilized the tools, AWS cost & usage report, saving plans, and actional data to optimize their AWS costs. The outcome: 27% reduced storage costs; 60% reduced Amazon Open Search Service cost.

The company has developed a customized cost and usage data tool through AWS services. It is helping them to reduce costs and deliver actional business metrics.

Final Stage: Avoid these mistakes

Often, businesses make mistakes like misconfiguration, choosing the wrong resource, etc., leading to increased costs. Check the following points to avoid mistakes:

• Never create or set up cloud resources without using auto-scaling options or other monitoring tools. It happens during Dev/test environments mostly.
• Take care while configuring storage resources, classes, and data types. Often, misconfiguration happens during storage tiers usage, such as Simple Storage Service (S3).
• Avoid over-provisioned resources by properly consolidating them. You must know the concept of right-sizing to find the perfect match between instance types, sizes, and capacity requirements at a minimal cost.
• Choose a pricing plan carefully based on your infrastructure requirements. This mistake can cost you an expensive cloud deployment.
• Never ignore the newer technologies, as they can reduce your cloud spending and helps in increasing productivity in work.

Closing Thought

The report is proof to know that AWS helps businesses in cost savings up to 80% over the equivalent on-premises options. It lowers costs and allows companies to use savings for innovation. So, what are you waiting for, plan to migrate your on-premise IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud, calculate costs by following the steps, and optimize it by preventing typical mistakes?

Managing your IT infrastructure’s overall direct and indirect costs requires time and process. TCO analysis for a cloud migration project is a daunting job. But, AWS TCO analysis makes this complex process easy. Take advantage of this analysis and determine your cloud migration project cost.

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According to the Market Research Future report, the application modernization services market is expected to reach USD 24.8 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 16.8%. Nobel technologies and improved applications are two driving factors of this growing market size. On one side, it is growing, and on another side, it is failing also. According to this report, unclear project expectations are the biggest reason behind its failure.

That’s why app modernization is a big decision for your organization and business expansion. To avoid failure, you must prepare a list of good questions before planning the app’s modernization. Read the full article to understand a brief of app modernization, its need cum benefits, and questions which could help in designing the best app modernization strategy.

What is App modernization?

App modernization replaces or updates existing software, applications, or IT infrastructure with new applications, platforms, or frameworks. It is like an application upgrade on a period to utilize the technology trends and innovation. The primary purpose of app modernization is to improve the current legacy systems’ efficiency, security, and performance. The process encompasses not only updating or replacing but also reengineering the entire infrastructure.

Need/Benefits of App modernization

Application modernization is growing across industries. It meant it became an essential business need. Here are points which are highlighting that why you need the app modernization for your business:

• To improve the business performance
• To scale the IT infrastructure to work globally
• To increase the security and protection of expensive IT assets
• To enhance the efficiency of business processes and operations
• To reduce the costs which happen due to the incompatibility of older systems with newer technologies

10 Questions need to consider before planning the app modernization

Before designing the add modernization strategy, you need a list of questions according to your business objective and services. Here are questions that might help you to make a proper plan for app modernization:

1. What is the age of your existing legacy business applications?

You have to understand your existing IT infrastructure and resources. How it is working and performing in the current environment. Are they creating problems or running smoothly? Are they causing downtime often? If they are too old, you need to replace everything; although if you upgrade them regularly, check which resource needs to modernize.

2. What are the organization’s current technical skills and resources?

You have to analyze the existing team and experts and understand whether they can adapt to the new infrastructure. You have to know their capabilities regarding learning new applications. In case you did modernization without analyzing your existing team’s capability, but after some time, you find that your experts are facing issues while working on the new IT environment. Thus, knowing the current technical skills and how you would train them for the transformation is good.

3. Would you be willing to conduct a Proof Of Concept (POV) to verify the platform’s functionality?

Are new system features able to solve the problems, and are they beneficial for business? You need to perform POV to check the new system’s functionality and find out how it works. POV can help you to examine the essential features and other characteristics of modernized apps.

4. Can the new system be easily modified to meet the business’s and customers’ changing needs?

Business needs and customer demands are not static. You know it, and it changes as soon as technological advancement or regulatory changes happen. It would be best if you found out that an application would be able to adopt the changes to fulfill your business requirements.

5. How have you surveyed the market and decided on the appropriate platform(s) to execute essential modernization?

You must research the market and list all vendors offering the services you seek for your application modernization. Analyze all factors before finalizing the best platform and services aligned with your objective.

6. How secure are the applications currently?

You have to find the security level of your legacy applications. Because modern apps need high levels and advanced security systems. Old security practices on modern apps might fail your project, so better to check the existing security.

7. Assess the opportunity costs and business risks associated with avoiding modernization?

If you avoid the app modernization, how many business opportunities might you lose, or how many risks might you face? If you escape them, you might face many losses. As discussed, modernization is a business priority in this futuristic technology era. So, be sure to understand its importance on time and execute it as soon as possible.

8. What type of modernization are you seeking?

You need to know the flexibility of your decision regarding app modernization. In simple words, which kind of modernization are you looking for in your business progress? Are you looking for a permanent or a system that could be altered in some years?

9. Did you consider the cloud when designing your application?

Running applications and managing the whole IT infrastructure on the cloud is a business priority. If your legacy applications are not compatible with the cloud, you must understand how you can make them cloud compatible. By doing this, you can easily migrate and modernize your applications to the cloud.

10. Determine what integrations are required to modernize the app?

With modernized applications, you must know the required integrations among hardware, software, or other IT assets. This answer will help you locate the best and ideal platform for your business process execution.

Forbes Councils Member Yasin Altaf has pointed out four factors – evaluate technical and business challenges, assess the current state of the legacy system, find out the right approach, and plan in his recent article. Besides being the leading voice in emerging enterprise technology, Infoworld has also revealed that time and proper tools are key drivers of the app modernization success in this report. In addition, giving time to develop and plan is the best way, according to 36% of IT leaders.

Thus, along with these questions, you must consider factors like time, budget, risk factors, and management constraints before planning the modern app.

Closing Thought

You research, ask questions from various resources, and analyze everything before purchasing anything!

Why?

To get the exemplary product/service!

It applies to app modernisation too. Your business needs modernized applications in the modern technology era. A questionnaire will help you plan an appropriate app modernization if you want the right service and execution. We hope the questions we have provided can help you find answers to all your questions. Interested in modernizing your legacy applications? Contact us. You can always count on our expert team for assistance.

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