Identify and retire applications early in your migration

Identifying and then retiring applications early in the migration process is important and should be carried out while workloads are being migrated.

Migration projects often prioritize migrating workloads, so it’s common for systems that are identified as to be retired (and not migrated) to receive focus toward the end of the project. However, there's a risk that leaving these applications until the end of the project will leave very little time to include it in the migration if the application is later deemed important.

Retiring workloads early during a migration project reduces the workload of teams that maintain them. For example, retiring servers during a migration project’s early phases means that operating system teams have fewer servers to patch, upgrade, maintain, or support. Those teams are then able to focus on the migration project itself.

Finally, some of this guide’s best practices are most effective when you follow them for longer periods of time. If you begin the retirement process early but later determine that an application is actually required by another service, you will be able to modify your migration plan and include it in a future migration wave.