3.4. Migration and Modernization Strategies
đź’ˇ First Principle: A successful transition to the cloud requires a systematic approach to planning, executing, and optimizing the migration of existing workloads, followed by a strategic evolution towards cloud-native architectures to unlock full agility and innovation.
Scenario: A large enterprise has a sprawling on-premises IT infrastructure with a mix of legacy applications and modern workloads. They want to move to AWS to reduce costs, increase agility, and leverage cloud-native capabilities.
Migrating existing applications to AWS and modernizing them to leverage cloud-native capabilities is a core skill for Solutions Architects. The SAP-C02 exam often presents scenarios involving complex migration planning and strategic modernization decisions. This phase covers the various approaches to migration, tools for data and server migration, and strategies for modernizing applications.
You will learn to assess on-premises environments, choose appropriate migration paths, and design the phased cutover to AWS, ensuring minimal disruption and maximum benefit.
Visual: Migration & Modernization Journey
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⚠️ Common Pitfall: A "lift-and-shift" migration with no plan for future modernization. While rehosting is a valid first step, stopping there means leaving most of the cloud's benefits—like elasticity, managed services, and serverless—on the table.
Key Trade-Offs:
- Speed of Migration vs. Cloud Optimization: The fastest migration strategies (like rehosting) provide the fewest cloud-native benefits. The most beneficial strategies (like refactoring) take the most time and effort.
Reflection Question: Why is a phased and strategic approach to migration, considering different modernization strategies (e.g., rehost, replatform, refactor), more effective than a "big bang" migration for a large enterprise with a mix of legacy and modern workloads, when the goals are cost reduction, agility, and cloud-native capabilities?