Introducing the New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS

Cloud migrations are seldom easy or inexpensive. We hear over and over from our customers about the many challenges they face in planning and executing their cloud adoption initiatives, whether that’s tracking the progress of the migration, determining the actual costs and savings involved, or understanding how a migration impacts their applications, end users, and business results.

Introducing the New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS

We believe that you should be able to track and monitor every aspect of your migration and its benefits, just like you would track any mission-critical development and infrastructure project. To help make that possible, and to make your adoption of AWS as successful as possible, we’re introducing the New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution (CAS) for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Our CAS is a unique combination of people, processes, and technology designed to manage complexity and give you a thorough understanding of the entire migration process from inception, through planning, and on to implementation and operation. The CAS can help you:

• Plan and prioritize your migration more effectively.
• Understand the scale of your migration.
• Track the migration process in real time, and see its impact on your business performance and bottom-line results.
• Determine if you’re meeting the business goals defined during planning—are your costs in line with expectations?
• See how the migration affects your customers.
• Discover whether the migration is helping your organization react quickly to market changes.

The New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS: a framework for cloud success

Put simply, New Relic and AWS provide the monitoring and cloud technology, while the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and the New Relic CAS supply the methodology and a common language for everyone to use when dealing with these complex issues. We have also partnered with a community of software vendors and systems integrators that offer the personnel and hands-on expertise required to make your cloud adoption initiative as fast, smooth, and successful as possible.

As outlined in the diagram above, your cloud migration journey with MAP and CAS includes readiness and planning phases, as well as the actual migration; each of these phases includes a number of more detailed steps (more on that in a moment). With deep technology integration from our AWS and ISV partners, the New Relic CAS provides crucial insights into each phase of your cloud migration journey. Our systems integrator partners—listed at the bottom of the diagram—are trained to implement these integrations for our customers.

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The CAS ecosystem brings together New Relic and New Relic Expert Services with AWS and AWS Professional Services, along with a carefully selected group of systems integrators and software vendors—including RISC Networks, TSO Logic, and Cloudamize—who help with portfolio discovery. Together, we do the hard work of integrating the technology, building an ecosystem and framework, creating a common language, and developing a content library so that you don’t have to stitch together a solution across multiple vendors and service providers.

How New Relic CAS aligns with AWS MAP

AWS created MAP to help enterprises realize the full business benefits of moving workloads to AWS as quickly and efficiently as possible. AWS MAP includes methodology, tools, services, and partners to apply best practices to cloud migration projects.

AWS MAP consists of three phases:

1. Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA): Assessing your current state and determining the foundations of your migration.
2. Migration Readiness and Planning (MRP): Writing the business cases, prioritizing your workloads, and developing a detailed plan for the migration.
3. Migration and Operations (M&O): Assisting in continuing operations and transformation once you’ve migrated your workloads to the cloud.

New Relic connects monitoring of all types of applications, infrastructure, end-user experience, and business metrics to the final, M&O phase of a cloud migration. But the CAS framework’s tools, prebuilt content, and best practices offer essential visibility and actionable insights directly aligned to all three phases of the AWS MAP—all delivered via a “single pane of glass.”

Let’s take a look at how the New Relic CAS works with each phase.

Phase 1: New Relic CAS in the Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA)

In the initial phase of a cloud adoption, you assess your current environment and prioritize which workloads you want to migrate first. Our infrastructure discovery partners in the New Relic CAS work with you to understand your existing infrastructure and identify dependencies. The key here is to monitor workloads at the infrastructure level so you have the information needed to “rightsize” your migration. For example, if an application server is running at a 10% utilization rate, you want to provision a cloud instance to match the actual usage rather than the original, over-provisioned hardware capacity.

It is essential to include monitoring at the beginning of the MAP process to get full end-to-end visibility into your migration. The CAS ecosystem integrates our partner ISVs with the New Relic platform to make this possible. We’ve even created sample New Relic Insights dashboards—like the ones shown below—to jumpstart this step. Some are high-level executive dashboards that track the overall migration; others are more detailed, IT-level dashboards. Customers can easily adapt them to their own environments.

Phase 2: New Relic CAS in the Migration Readiness and Planning (MRP)

During the second phase—Migration Readiness and Planning—the New Relic CAS provides in-depth analysis of dependencies in your applications and infrastructure. We then use this analysis to inform planning decisions and prioritize workload migrations. These detailed plans are essential to minimize risk during the migration process.

As you develop your prioritization plan, it is important to monitor and establish baselines for each application before beginning the actual migration work. The New Relic CAS guides you through the application baselining process and helps create the detailed business case for your MRP. The baseline also serves as an essential comparison point to track changes in application performance before, during, and after the actual migration. It’s critical to understand, at a granular level, how the migration has affected your digital user experience. Without documenting both the before and after migration states, you have no way to tell what’s really changed.

The CAS also includes establishing business KPIs during the MRP phase to help understand and measure the bottom-line impact of your migration. Typically, the ultimate goal of a migration is to save money or generate revenue. Pulling together performance and business data into New Relic gives you a single place to determine if you’re achieving these goals.

Phase 3: New Relic CAS in Migration and Operations (M&O)

During the final phase—Migration and Operations—the New Relic CAS provides visibility into application performance and end-user experience after a migration. This capability enables you to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks as well as to optimize workloads.

Detailed examinations of the performance of your applications across the entire stack helps you determine if refactoring your applications could amplify the migration’s contribution to your business. These can help you determine, for example, whether to consider using AWS Lambda or AWS Auto Scaling for particular workload profiles.

Finally, to reduce the impact on your business when something goes wrong, the CAS calls for defining alerts based on business and system metrics. This can help optimize incident response and lead to faster resolutions of performance and availability issues.

The New Relic CAS puts it all together to bring quantifiable value to every step in the cloud adoption process.

Just as important, New Relic enables you to extend the benefits of the CAS throughout your organization. IT teams, for example, can show the results of the migration to the rest of the business. Program owners can know exactly how they’re doing and enjoy data-driven predictability of further progress. Business owners can see the actual return on their investment. And executives can talk confidently to customers and shareholders about the cloud migration's impact on the business.

Getting started with the New Relic Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS

To get started, all you need to do is tell us where you are in your cloud migration journey—and the most important goals you want to accomplish. To make the process of getting started even easier, you can begin with selections from a predefined catalog of best practices and dashboards that you can customize to fit your environment. New Relic and our CAS partners have figured out the technology, process, and people aspects to make it happen for you.

Ready to get started? Ask your New Relic team (or complete the Contact Us form here) to tell you more about the Cloud Adoption Solution for AWS. Keep in mind that while you can activate the New Relic CAS at any point in your cloud migration, the impact is far greater when you deploy it as soon as you begin thinking about migrating to the cloud.