Migrating Web Services from Light Space to ECS

By Sathiya Sarathi

Deploying Web Services on Alibaba Cloud

Modern stand-alone web applications can be deployed in many ways. Alibaba Cloud provides services ranging from single-click deployments known as Light Space (also known as Simple Application Service) to fully elastic and customizable instances using the Elastic Compute Services.

Now, you can start building Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on Light Space for as low as 1.65 USD/month (19.90 USD for the first year.) This pricing is available only for a limited time.

When there's a need to run multiple applications to work alongside the native hosted applications, the applications hosted on Light Space can be migrated to Elastic Compute Service in the same region or different regions using the simple steps below.

Migrating Web Servers in the Same Region

The following guide explains how to migrate a WordPress site hosted as a virtual private server application hosted on Light Space:

Step 1: Log in to Alibaba Cloud account and choose the Simple Application Service. From the list of servers, choose the one that you want to migrate. In this walkthrough, the application server in Germany (Frankfurt) will be migrated:

The public IP of the application results are on the following webpage. This walkthrough aims to replicate the same page by deploying the application's image on Elastic Compute Service.

Step 2: Disk snapshots are essential to creating an image for a virtual private server application. On the left pane of the Light Space (Simple Application Service console), choose Disk. Choose the System Disk for which the image needs to be created and click the Create Snapshot option.

After completing the snapshot creation, a custom image can be created, which will be migrated to the Elastic Compute Service. Click the Snapshots button on the side pane, and the previously created snapshot will appear on the console. Now, click the Create Custom Image button to create an image out of the snapshot:

You can define a custom image name and description to create an image out of the snapshot:

It lists the created image under the Images tab of the Light Space console. Finally, click the Share to ECS option to copy this image onto the Elastic Compute Service. Upon confirmation, this copies the created image to Elastic Compute Service.

Step 3: Open the Elastic Compute Service console, select images from the side pane, and choose the corresponding region where the application was hosted. In this example, the application is hosted in the region: Germany (Frankfurt).

Click the Shared Image tab to reveal the image that was shared from Light Space. From here, the instance for the image can be created by pressing the Create Instance hyperlink shown in the image below:

Follow the wizard by choosing the required configuration to create the instance and create an order. This results in a confirmation message denoting the successful purchase of the instance with the custom image that we created earlier.

The newly spawned instance can be found in the console shown below:

Let's pick the public IP address and check if the WordPress site is accessible. As shown below, locating the public IP address of the instance results in the page we saw earlier:

It shows that the application has been successfully migrated from Light Space to Elastic Compute Service.

Migrating Web Servers to a Different Region

The previous section dealt with the migration of a standalone Virtual Private Server Application on Light Space to an Elastic Compute Service instance in the same region. What if you need to migrate to a different region? All the steps above remain the same except for an extra process in Step 3.

Step 3.1: The image has to be copied to the preferred region before sharing it with ECS. This can be done by clicking on the Copy Image option. In the copy image window, specify the Destination Region and Custom Image Name:

In this walkthrough, we are copying the image from Germany (Frankfurt) to China (Hong Kong). It will result in the image getting created on the Simple Application Service Images dashboard:

This created image can be shared to ECS directly, and the image can be located on the ECS console by selecting the corresponding region:

The application can be migrated to ECS easily by following the remaining steps from the previous section.

Community

Migrating Web Services from Light Space to ECS

Deploying Web Services on Alibaba Cloud

Migrating Web Servers in the Same Region

Migrating Web Servers to a Different Region

Read previous post:

Read next post:

Alibaba Cloud Community

You may also like

Comments

Alibaba Cloud Community

Related Products

Cloud Migration Solution

Database Migration Solution

ECS(Elastic Compute Service)

Oracle Database Migration Solution