amazon web services: cost analysis and migration solution tools?

Question

My firm is considering moving to cloud based services for our in house web application. We are evaluating AWS and we are in the early stages of doing some cost analysis on whether it's cost effective for us to move to AWS. I'm new to AWS and before I reinvent the wheel, are there tools (websites, Excel spreadsheet, ROI calculators, etc) available that can help determine the correct AWS solution and costs? For example, if I have three Linux app servers, 2 database servers, 10 load balancers, etc, how do I map the correct AWS solution to what we have today and determine costs from moving from our current architecture/infrastructure to AWS?

If there are no tools for this, are there message boards, communities or other resources that can help?

Answer 1

The mapping will have to be done internally, atleast that was the case for us. Used Visio to draw out current infrastructure and another for the proposed cloud infrastrucutre.

From our experience, it is next to impossible to get an actual Amazon engineer on the horn to assist. We are even purchasing a better support plan just for the engineer access.

Regarding cost, best tool is the AWS Calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

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Answer 2

There is a monthly calculator here http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

And loads of documentation here http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance

With that you should be able to have a good idea of the ROI of this project.