Every cloud migration is sold on the destination. The work that actually determines whether customers notice happens long before anything moves — in discovery, sequencing, and rehearsal. Get those right and the cutover is an anticlimax. That is the goal.
Map before you move
The single most common cause of a painful migration is an incomplete dependency map. A workload that looks self-contained turns out to call a database nobody documented, which is replicated to a system nobody owns. You find these the hard way during cutover, or the easy way during discovery.
We spend real time here. Every workload is classified — rehost, replatform, or retire — with a cost model attached. A surprising fraction of any legacy estate is better retired than migrated, and finding that out early is pure profit.
Sequence around the business, not the org chart
Waves should be ordered by business risk and dependency, not by which team shouts loudest. We migrate the least-coupled, lowest-risk workloads first to prove the landing zone, then work toward the load-bearing systems with the machinery already exercised.
Rehearse the rollback, not just the roll-forward
Teams rehearse the migration. Fewer rehearse the rollback. But the rollback is the thing that lets you move confidently during a real business window, because the cost of being wrong is bounded. Every wave we run has a rehearsed, time-boxed path back.
Prove each wave in production
A wave is not done when it is deployed; it is done when it has served real traffic and the metrics agree. We hold each wave in production until it is boring, then start the next. It feels slow. It is how nine months of migration produces zero customer-visible incidents.
None of this is glamorous, and that is the point. The best migration is the one nobody outside the project ever knew was happening.
Begin a conversation → about the systems you depend on.