Migration to AWS Cloud

The six most common application migration strategies are:

Rehosting — Otherwise known as “lift-and-shift”. Many early cloud projects gravitate toward net new development using cloud-native capabilities, but in a large legacy migration scenario where the organization is looking to scale its migration quickly to meet a business case, applications can be rehosted. Most rehosting can be automated with tools (e.g., CloudEndure Migration, AWS VM Import/Export), although you can do this manually to apply changes on legacy systems to the new cloud platform.

Replatforming — Sometimes, this is called “lift-tinker-and-shift.” Here you might make a few cloud (or other) optimizations in order to achieve some tangible benefit, but you aren’t otherwise changing the core architecture of the application. You may be looking to reduce the amount of time you spend managing database instances by migrating to a database-as-a-service platform like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or migrating your application to a fully managed platform like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

Repurchasing — Moving to a different product. Repurchasing is a move to a SaaS platform. Moving a CRM to Salesforce.com, an HR system to Workday, a CMS to Drupal, etc.

Refactoring / Re-architecting — Re-imagining how the application is architected and developed, typically using cloud-native features. This is typically driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment. For example, migrating from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented (or server-less) architecture to boost agility.

Retire — This strategy basically means: “Get rid of.” Once you’ve discovered everything in your environment, you might ask each functional area who owns each application and see that some of the applications are no longer used. You can save costs by retiring these applications.

Retain — Usually this means “revisit” or do nothing (for now). Maybe you aren’t ready to prioritize an application that was recently upgraded or is otherwise not inclined to migrate some applications. You can retain these applications and revisit your migration strategy.