Strategy and best practices for AWS large migrations

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

May 2022 (document history)

Many AWS customers want to migrate a large number of servers and applications to the AWS Cloud as fast as possible with the least impact to their business. Your organization might be starting a large migration project because a data center lease is approaching renewal or termination or because your organization is taking the first steps in a technology transformation. However, large scale is not quantified only by the number of servers in scope. It also accounts for the level of organizational transformation that results from the migrations, considering complexities such as people, processes, technology, and priorities.

This guide focuses on your ability to move at scale to AWS. You can migrate existing applications with little to no change. You can use the cloud as a launch point to take those applications to cloud-native or serverless technologies, and you can modernize the applications to unlock additional business benefits.

This guide discusses best practices for large-scale migrations and provides use cases from customers across various segments, such as financial services, and healthcare. It also provides real-world examples of lessons learned during customer migrations to AWS. The aim of this guide is to assist customers who are at the initial stages of a large-scale migration. However, the best practices and strategies in this guide can be beneficial at any stage of the migration journey. It’s assumed that you already have a 100-level knowledge of AWS services and that you’re aware of the AWS recommended process for migrating.

Guidance for large migrations

Migrating 300 or more servers is considered a large migration. The people, process, and technology challenges of a large migration project are typically new to most enterprises. This document is part of an AWS Prescriptive Guidance series about large migrations to the AWS Cloud. This series is designed to help you apply the correct strategy and best practices from the outset, to streamline your journey to the cloud.

The following figure shows the other documents in this series. Review the strategy first, then the guides, and then proceed to the playbooks. To access the complete series, see Large migrations to the AWS Cloud.