By providing scalability, cost-effectiveness, and improved performance, cloud computing has recently transformed the way organizations manage their IT infrastructure. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services are two of the industry’s top competitors. While GCP has established itself as a powerful rival, offering comprehensive services and cutting-edge solutions, AWS has long enjoyed a dominant position in the industry. AWS had a market share of around 32% as of 2021, making it the most popular public cloud service, while GCP held a share of about 9%. These statistics show how important both platforms are and how vital their services are to the cloud computing ecosystem.

There can be a need to switch from one cloud provider to another as organizations develop and technological environments shift. It may be decided to switch from AWS to GCP for several reasons, including cost reduction, a change in strategic goals, compliance needs, or the desire to use particular GCP-only features. Whatever the driving force, a successful transfer requires careful planning, diligent execution, and a thorough knowledge of both cloud platforms.

This piece will examine a more significant part of the processes associated with the migration from AWS to GCP.

Why opt for GCP over AWS?

• Open-Source Solutions

From Google’s set of services, GCP offers a variety of open-source offerings. You can be confident that customers of GCP will gain from Google’s open-source position, given the release of even-more open-source products. The supply of open-source solutions is where Google Cloud excels since open-source is a fundamental component of contemporary cloud computing platforms.

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities

Tensor Processing Unit, Google’s AI processing system, is accessible through GCP. This system provides computing using neural networks and machine learning. Although AWS offers excellent artificial intelligence capabilities as well, GCP beats it in accessibility as well as usability. The perfect environment to operate your artificial intelligence and machine learning activities is Google Cloud since several big data and ML projects, like TensorFlow and Hadoop, are Google products.

• Security

Google has an outstanding record of success in reliable security and top-notch data encryption. You can secure your cloud infrastructure at the application layer using GCP. In turn, this lessens security vulnerabilities brought on by improper setup.

• Manageable prices

For their particular cloud computing offerings, GCP and AWS both have affordable price options. However, GCP makes a significant distinction thanks to its price reductions. GCP offers you exclusive discounts whenever your apps are running for prolonged periods. This implies that you receive reduced fees to continue accomplishing what you were engaging in.

• Latest Kubernetes Versions 

Even though AWS provides Kubernetes services, organizations rely on GCP for orchestration because Kubernetes is a Google-developed project. GCP grants you exclusive access to the latest Kubernetes editions along with other extremely reliable Kubernetes resources and services.

AWS to GCP Migration Step by Step

A strategic move, switching from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), permits enterprises to use the advantages of both cloud providers and react to evolving company demands. The migration procedure necessitates meticulous preparation, implementation, and validation to achieve a seamless and effective change. The main steps in the overall process are as follows:

• Assessment and Planning

A thorough evaluation of the current AWS infrastructure is an essential initial step in the transition phase. Assessing the present infrastructure, applications, data, and interdependencies is necessary for the transition. With this information, businesses may create a thorough migration strategy that specifies objectives, deadlines, resource allocators, and the preferred destination architecture on GCP. Careful planning is necessary to reduce risks, save expenses, and guarantee a smooth move. Inventory and dependency planning, performance and cost analysis, service compatibility, and risk analysis are all approaches in the evaluation and planning phase.

Inventory and dependency mapping requires you to thoroughly inventory all AWS resources, including virtual machines, databases, storage, load balancers, and networking components. You must also identify resource interdependencies throughout this step to prevent interruptions during migration.

To benchmark the required performance level on GCP when doing performance analysis, you must monitor the performance metrics of your apps in AWS.

On the other hand, the cost analysis, service compatibility, and risk analysis tasks call for you to assess the costs endured in your AWS environment and any potential cost savings that can be made on GCP. It also calls for you to evaluate the compatibility of AWS services with GCP equivalents, find any functional gaps, identify potential risks and challenges during migration, and develop mitigation strategies to reduce disruptions.

• Data Migration

Data migration must be done safely and effectively because it is the foundation of any firm. Transferring data from AWS storage services to the equivalent GCP services is part of this step. Applications must be concurrently evaluated for GCP compliance, and any required changes or tweaks must be done. If necessary, this stage also involves fully containerizing apps to leverage GCP’s Kubernetes Engine. The techniques used in this phase consist of:

• Custom Data Transfer

Custom migration scripts may be created to assure data correctness and consistency for complicated systems with specific data needs.

• Cloud Storage Transfer Service

Data may be seamlessly transferred from Amazon S3 to Google Cloud Storage with the help of Google Cloud’s Storage Transfer Service. It manages massive transfers with minimum human involvement.

• Transfer Appliances

GCP offers transfer equipment that may be delivered to your location to speed up data transfer for vast amounts of data.

• Application Migration

Applications must be carefully considered when moving from AWS to GCP since the underlying architecture and services may vary. Rehosting and restructuring, networking, load balancing, application containerization, and database migration are crucial factors to consider throughout the application migration process.

You must choose between rehosting the application as-is and restructuring it to use native GCP services and capabilities for optimum performance when rehosting and refactoring.

Components like VPCs and subnets must be configured on GCP to mimic the AWS networking architecture. Applications on GCP will have excellent availability and scalability thanks to the implementation of Google Cloud Load Balancing.

Application containerization utilizing containers and Kubernetes will provide better portability and scalability.

Finally, at this step of database migration, you may move databases to managed database services like GCP’s Cloud SQL or another managed database service, guaranteeing data consistency and minimizing downtime.

• Testing and Validation

It’s crucial to rigorously test and validate the migrated apps to ensure they work as intended before completely committing to the GCP environment. To find and fix any problems, thorough testing must also be carried out, including functional, load, and security testing.

• Post-Migration Optimization

To achieve optimum efficacy and cost-effectiveness when the migration is over, it’s critical to optimize your GCP environment. Resource optimization, cloud cost control, and autoscaling are some of the benefits of post-migration optimization.

By regularly monitoring and adjusting resource allocations to fit the demands of real applications, resource optimization will enable you to maximize both performance and cost.

On the other side, autoscaling aids in utilizing GCP’s autoscaling features to alter resources per traffic variations dynamically.

GCP has cost management features that are beneficial for adequately managing and optimizing cloud spending.

Conclusion

Transitioning from AWS to GCP is a challenging but rewarding process that gives your company new opportunities. You may switch to GCP smoothly by carefully evaluating your current infrastructure, making detailed plans, and following best practices when migrating data and applications. You’ll be comfortably on your way to exploiting the advantages of the Google Cloud Platform for your business’s future expansion and success with diligent testing and optimization post-migration.

Planning to migrate from AWS to GCP connect with our cloud computing company : Aalpha information systems.