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Moving Client/Server application to Amazon Web Services

I have a standard client / server application, VB .Net a running on the client hitting a SqlServer database. Half of the users are in the same location as the database server and the other half work in another city. The remote folks are coming into the database server thru a 3mb MPLS. In both sites I have a 20mb internet line. The physical disk storing the database is averaging 200 IOPS ,123 MBs, Reads 66%, Write 34%.

I am planning to move the application to an AWS EC2 instance. My LAN is connected to the AWS VPC via Virtual Private Gateway. I am currently running the company retail site in AWS. The website servers in AWS are not part of the domain, but if I move the database server to AWS I assume I will need to make it part of the domain, user id/passwords and such...

I am interested in best practices migrating client/server applications to the cloud. Also anything I should be concerned about regarding security, making AWS servers’ part of my domain and throughput running the application on the cloud.

Aaron Tomosky

The first thing I consider is the locality between the server and client app. Often times that is chatty and latency sensitive and the server going to the cloud while the client stays onsite can show problems. The solution for that is to put the client near the server and use RDS to access.

That all said, since you already have remote users and they seem to have good performance, it sounds like you have avoided this issue.

1. Security: make different network groups for public servers (web), their private backend (sql), and any other distinct groups. Lock those down with white lists of ip addresses and ports
2. Backups: azure and aws have some great backups offerings but they need to be setup sometimes at both the machine later and the app later
3. Monitoring: use the consoles in the cloud to monitor web, firewall type access, backups, etc... this ties into the need for documentation and organization, it's easy to add a machine and another and another and quickly hard to tell what talks to what. Name things well, make different resource group buckets, and avoid sprawl.

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