Guidelines for a successful migration - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
PlanningActivities

Guidelines for a successful migration

This section includes guidelines for planning your migration and for migration sprint activities.

Planning

Before migrating resources to AWS, you need to choose the migration method, tools (if applicable), and operating model that you're using to manage, govern, and secure your environment. As part of planning for the migration, do the following:

  • Create a comprehensive wave plan with key assumptions. Identify dependencies, tools, the number of sprints, and ownership of the sprints.

  • Build the account structure, access, security, network, connectivity, automation, and pipelines.

  • Have the landing zone ready.

  • Select and obtain the migration tools.

  • Define the change control and impact assessment processes.

  • Define the communication plan.

  • Define the production operations and operating model.

  • Select and commit the resources, including partners.

Activities

Plan activities for all sprint weeks. Everyone on the team must participate!

  • Create key metrics to guide the team and monitor progress. Identify key results for each objective.

  • Conduct a pre-mortem to understand and plan for risks.

  • Establish a schedule and select tools to keep everyone informed.

  • Hold an inception retrospective to identify and improve any sprint activities.

  • Reprioritize the product backlog.

  • Create a day roadmap for practices to continue.

  • Hold a retrospective to improve.

  • Don't deviate from the schedule.

Teams should also establish a shorter cadence for sprints, planning, and retrospective meetings. We suggest one-week or two-week sprints to provide quick feedback, to allow for pivoting, and to create a sense of urgency.

In the Wave 1 migrations, you developed a blueprint and building blocks for the migration process, and tested specific migration patterns. Now you’re ready to scale teams to support your initial wave of migrations to build the migration factory process, and expand on the agile team model for your entire application portfolio.

You can use the migration factory process illustrated earlier in this guide to pave the way for the larger move to AWS. This is a process that can efficiently handle the migration workload by combining the technical components of a cloud migration with the business and people components.