Setting up an agile program to accelerate cloud migrations

Vijay Thumma, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

August 2019 (document history)

Cloud adoption is more than just a technology transformation. To move to the cloud effectively, organizations can use the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) and its six perspectives (business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations) as a framework to ensure a comprehensive view of the transformation initiative.

This framework can help you understand which areas to improve before moving forward with a migration effort for enterprises. You can combine this framework with agile practices and streamlined cloud migrations to move quickly and innovate faster. We recommend embracing an agile approach for large migrations to the cloud—not just as a discrete activity.

Targeted business outcomes

This guide discusses how you can take an agile approach to accelerating cloud migrations at scale. There are two primary outcomes expected from this guide:

• Steps to set up an agile program with epics for defined workstreams in the readiness and planning phase (see the following diagram). This program builds the core components of the cloud operational foundation to align, enable, and mobilize the workforce and resources for a successful migration.

• Guidelines for migration planning and implementation using sprints. These guidelines help you to discover, transform, and deploy complex sets of workload components.

The prescriptive model that we describe in this guide is built on direct customer engagement experiences in the field. Your adoption strategy should be closely aligned with your business goals and objectives. Your decision process for migrating resources to AWS depends on the migration method (for example, rehost, refactor, replatform). This guide leads you through the implementation process, and helps you align with other processes and launch functions in the readiness and planning phase.

The following diagram describes the various phases of the overall migration process, including assessment, readiness and planning, and migrations. It also includes details about the workstreams that are part of the readiness and planning phase.