Accelerating critical cloud migrations with AWS Countdown and AWS Countdown Premium

Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving cloud landscape, organizations frequently undertake complex operational changes that require careful planning and expert execution. According to Gartner research, 50% of planned cloud migrations experience delays of 2 or more years because of the scarcity of skilled cloud professionals.

AWS Countdown provides structured support for your critical cloud operations. Whether it's migrations, cloud modernization, product launches, or go-live events, these operations demand meticulous planning and flawless execution. You can tailor AWS Countdown to different complexity levels and support requirements. It provides specialized support services that are designed to help customers navigate these challenging transitions with confidence and precision.

What is AWS Countdown?

AWS offers two tiers of AWS Countdown services to match your specific operational needs and complexity requirements.

AWS Countdown

For AWS Countdown, your Technical Account Manager (TAM) provides guided support and offers technical guidance and coordination throughout your event. This engagement includes preliminary planning assistance, regular check-ins with the TAM, and limited support during the actual event. AWS Countdown is particularly suitable for organizations with internal expertise who need additional guidance and validation.

AWS Countdown Premium

AWS Countdown Premium provides critical support across all phases of your cloud projects, from design to post-launch analysis. From a team of AWS experts, designated engineers are selected to provide proactive guidance, assist with the planning process, host regular check-ins, and provide event day cut-over support. These engineers are involved from project inception to help with progress, provide access to subject matter experts (SMEs), and use support tools for faster issue resolution. 

For more information on the two tiers, see Comparing AWS Countdown and AWS Countdown Premium. For another example of a customer's journey with AWS Countdown Premium, see Maintaining business continuity with AWS Countdown Premium for critical events.

Which AWS Countdown tier is right for me?

The following migration scenarios highlight the practical differences between the two service tiers.

AWS Countdown: Enterprise application modernization

An AWS Enterprise Support customer needed to execute a complex modernization over the weekend for a mission-critical asset management system. This modernization involved migrating from IBM Maximo v7.6 to Maximo Application Suite (MAS) v9, and included several important technical checkpoints:

1. Migrate workload from on-premises to the AWS Cloud.

2. Migrate Windows/WebSphere to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).

3. Migrate the SQL Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Amazon Relational Database Server (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server.

Because the customer was an AWS Enterprise Support customer, they had unlimited AWS Countdown engagements. The customer contacted their TAM to initiate AWS Countdown 8 weeks before the cut-over. The TAM coordinated weekly technical discussions, provided strategic consultation, and highlighted critical focus areas that led to a successful migration.

The TAM provided the following key benefits during the engagement:

• Created a multi-Availability Zone deployment strategy for ROSA in three Availability Zones, and Amazon RDS in two Availability Zones. With this strategy, the customer improved the resilience of their cloud infrastructure.

• Developed and implemented backup and disaster recovery protocols for the customer.

• Identified infrastructure capacity requirements and service limitations.

• To proactively engage on-demand AWS Support Engineers, AWS created support cases with resource details to streamline support.

Post-event analysis

The modernization project succeeded, and the team identified several learnings to apply to future projects.

Use designated resources

Real-time AWS Support requirements led to multiple support cases across various AWS services. Designated AWS Support Engineers might have streamlined the support engagement, mitigating these concerns and preventing project delays.

Because the migration occurred over the weekend, AWS Support teams lacked the full context from previous planning discussions, which caused delays. To provide rapid issue resolutions, the support of designated and context-aware AWS Support Engineers with comprehensive migration expertise are essential during an event.

Trust the experts

The project required specialized expertise in both ROSA and Amazon RDS migrations throughout the project lifecycle. For your event, it's vital to have specialized support for you to succeed.

Gather your resources

To align and mitigate potential risks for the project, the customer's expertise, flexible change windows, and event management workbooks were all essential. For your event to succeed, make sure that you gather your resources and communicate with your TAM throughout the process.

AWS Countdown Premium: Network resource migration

An Enterprise Support customer was consolidating accounts across multiple AWS organizations into AWS Control Tower Landing Zone. As part of this migration, they had to migrate their multi-Region production network resources from one AWS organization to another. These resources included the following:

• AWS Direct Connect

• AWS Direct Connect gateway

• AWS Transit Gateway

To get comprehensive AWS Support, the customer subscribed to AWS Countdown Premium for a period of 2 months for the entire migration lifecycle.

For the engagement, AWS supported the user throughout the following process.

Initial setup (Days 1-4)

After the customer subscribed to AWS Countdown Premium, an AWS Countdown Premium engineer kicked off a meeting to establish requirements and timelines. Then, the engineer aligned with internal AWS teams to coordinate resources and provide weekend support.

Planning (Weeks 1-6)

During the planning phase, AWS Countdown Premium engineers and AWS Cloud Support Engineers held weekly meetings with the customer. With expertise in Direct Connect and AWS Transit Gateway, these experts helped the customer with the following challenges:

• How to change ownership of a Direct Connect connection from one AWS account to another.

• Developed a plan to create new resources in the destination account to replace the resources from the original account.

• Tested traffic flow in the existing connection to make sure that secondary transit virtual interfaces (VIFs) function as expected.

• Tested all resources to make sure that the resources worked as expected in the new configuration.

• Removed all legacy resources from the previous configuration to optimize resources.

• Created rollback plans to mitigate potential risks. These plans included coordinating quota increases and creating technical documentation resources.

• Arranged for context-aware support for the 16-hour weekend change window.

Implementation (Weekend of the event)

For the weekend of the event, the AWS Countdown Premium engineer and Direct Connect engineers joined the customer call to initiate the migration. During preparation, the team encountered an unexpected challenge when a  VIF became stuck in the Testing state. This challenge kept the customer from continuing the migration. To resolve this issue, the AWS Countdown Premium engineer and Direct Connect engineers escalated the issue to internal teams. They provided updates to the customer throughout the process. Then, internal teams ran diagnostics and identified the root cause and deployed a resolution to unblock the customer.

The swift troubleshooting and escalations decreased the need to rollback or postpone the customer's migration. Because of the success of the initial migration, the team could then use the success as a template to deploy subsequent migrations without issues. 

What is the AWS Countdown Premium advantage?

AWS Countdown Premium provides the following tools to transform complex operations into well-orchestrated projects:

• Designated project coordination through a single support channel

• Coordinated AWS Support Engineer availability

• Comprehensive risk mitigation through tailored runbooks

• Extended support windows during critical operations

• Context-aware AWS Support Engineers

• Flexible subscription-based model for cost-effective support

For information on AWS Countdown pricing and availability, see the AWS Countdown section of the AWS Support Frequently Asked Questions.

Conclusion

The choice between AWS Countdown and AWS Countdown Premium can depend on many factors: Your operational complexity, your internal expertise, the scope of AWS services involved, the complexity of your infrastructure, and your support requirements. While providing valuable guidance for straightforward transitions, AWS Countdown Premium delivers comprehensive support for complex migrations and critical operational changes where success is essential. To learn more about how AWS Countdown can support your cloud operations, visit AWS Countdown.

About the author

Ketan Kumar

Ketan is a Senior TAM at AWS based out of Dublin, Ireland. In his role, he provides strategic technical guidance to help customers use AWS best practices to plan and build solutions. He's dedicated to empower customers to develop scalable, resilient, and cost-effective architectures. In his free time, Ketan enjoys spending time with his wife and family, traveling, playing video games, and watching movies.