A cost-benefit analysis of AWS and Alibaba services for cloud migration

Raviselvam, Anbu Arivu Selvi (2024) A cost-benefit analysis of AWS and Alibaba services for cloud migration. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

Cloud migration is the process of transitioning applications, data, and overall IT infrastructure to a cloud platform. Although most newly developed applications are cloud-native ones, a number of on-prem applications could also be moved to the cloud if a good migration strategy is devised. This data-driven research delve into the cost-benefits of AWS and Alibaba services for two cloud migration strategies: rehosting (lift-and-shift) and re-platforming (lift-tinker-and-shift). Key performance indicators such as scalability, response time, cost, bandwidth and throughput were gathered. Rehosting resulted in speedy deployment with better throughput and bandwidth, as in AWS, where response times were hugely reduced to only 120 ms in comparison to 194 ms of a local, on-prem application which served as baseline. This approach provided the best cost-benefit strategy, with monthly cost of $23.09 in AWS, balancing performance and cost. Although, it delivered better than local host, rehosting could not fully leverage cloud capabilities for scalability, especially on Alibaba where response time increased to 3272 ms with large error rates. In contrast, re-platforming delivering a scalable and optimized approach, notably on AWS. Though response time surged to 239 ms, it still provided vital improvements in cost and scalability, with lower monthly cost of $12.30. Thus a few modifications to on-prem applications to use cloud resources is still worth exploring. Re-platforming resulted in a response time of 84 ms with a price of $10.29 on Alibaba, offering a better balance on both cost and performance than rehosting. Although rehosting is preferable for faster deployments, re-platforming provides significant long-term advantages in scalability, cost savings, cloud resource utilization, and performance. The study discovered that AWS shows 3.88x better performance than AWS, while Alibaba is 28.89% cheaper than AWS. The estimated cost and benefits are expected to assist organizations in making informed decisions concerning cloud migration.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Estrada, Giovani UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Cloud computing
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cloud Computing
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	16 Jul 2025 11:17
Last Modified:	16 Jul 2025 11:17
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/8145

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