AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question

The correct answer is AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN). AWS MGN is the primary service recommended for lift-and-shift migrations to AWS. It addresses all the requirements in the scenario. MGN uses a lightweight agent installed on source servers (both physical and virtual) to perform continuous, block-level replication to a staging area in the target AWS account. This continuous replication ensures that the data in AWS is only seconds or minutes behind the on-premises servers, which is critical for achieving a cutover downtime of under 10 minutes. Furthermore, MGN allows for the non-disruptive launch of test instances at any time from the replicated data, enabling thorough testing without impacting the source production servers.

• AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an older service being replaced by AWS MGN. It primarily migrates on-premises VMs to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and does not support physical servers. Its replication is based on periodic snapshots, leading to a longer cutover window compared to MGN's continuous replication.

• VM Import/Export is a service used to import virtual machine images (like VMDK or VHD files) to create AMIs. It is a manual, offline process that requires significant downtime to export, upload, and convert the image. It does not support continuous replication or live cutovers.

• AWS DataSync is a service for transferring file and object data between on-premises storage (such as NFS or SMB file shares) and AWS storage services like Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS. It does not migrate entire operating systems and applications to create bootable EC2 instances.