Design principles

Create a clear vision for the journey: Define the business goal of the migration (why migrate?) and think more about how you transform both your business and technology while migrating to AWS, not just about moving your workloads. The why and transformation goals are the key principles that help you define everything else during the migration journey.

Get leadership support early in the project: Executive sponsorship is critical as strong organizational alignment is required to make timely decisions and resolve potential challenges and tradeoffs. Consider forming a dedicated team, usually known as CCoE (for more detail, see What is a cloud center of excellence and why should organization create one?)

Understand where you are moving to: Learn about AWS and its differences from traditional on-premises data centers (or other clouds). This is critical to the migration's success. Define your AWS accounts strategy and leverage AWS Control Tower and AWS Organizations to build landing zones to provide ongoing account management, governance, and implementation of AWS best practices.

Define the migration scope: Determine what to migrate and, based on that, define the migration strategy (how to migrate).

Know your applications: Define what good looks like when moving to AWS. Based on that, choose the right migration strategy for each based on the 7 Rs approach (for more detail, see Determining the R type for migration).

Get the application owners and teams buy-in early: Understand application dependencies, both technical and business, internal, and external.

Understand your application requirements: For example, performance, utilization, resiliency, security, compliance, and operations. Optimize (right-size) to create more efficient and elastic workloads after the migration.

Align with applicable governance, regulatory and compliance frameworks: Incorporate security best practices as part of your workload migration strategy.

Maintain your operations during the migration to the Cloud: Consider your current operations while you have a hybrid environment and once you are completely on cloud. Plan your monitoring, backup, and lifecycle management at level required by your organization for production workloads.

Create the migration plans: Split migration into smaller units (migration waves), where each unit could be an application or a group of applications. Move each unit, test, validate and repeat. Create or adapt operational runbooks, seeking to automate the process of early migration waves (mobilize) and apply these runbooks to scale the migration of each subsequent wave.