Best practice arranged by migration phase

Assess Phase

Operational excellence pillar

• MIG-OPS-BP-1.1 Your migration plan must be informed by and reflect technology, processes and business

Security pillar

• MIG-SEC-BP-1.1 Understand the security credentials needed by the discovery tool

• MIG-SEC-BP-1.2 Understand how the discovery tool works

• MIG-SEC-BP-1.3 Understand the discovery tool's data security and apply appropriate controls

• MIG-SEC-BP-2.1  Perform a tools mapping exercise

• MIG-SEC-BP-3.1 Understand, establish, and implement compliance framework

Reliability pillar

• MIG-REL-BP-1.1: Define SLAs across all applications or environments (like production, development, or test) and confirm them with your business team

• MIG-REL-BP-1.2: Define and automate runbooks and communicate them to your teams

• MIG-REL-BP-1.3: Map AWS Global Infrastructure to your business SLAs before migrations starts

• MIG-REL-BP-1.4: Select tools to monitor SLAs and notify you in case thresholds are exceeded

• MIG-REL-BP-2.1: Keep your business impact analysis up-to-date

• MIG-REL-BP-2.2: Update the risk assessment for the type of disaster events covered by your BCP

• MIG-REL-BP-2.3: Define the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) targets

• MIG-REL-BP-2.4: Select a disaster recovery strategy based on cloud best practices

• MIG-REL-BP-3.1: Estimate the required maintenance window

• MIG-REL-BP-3.2: Test the migration window and impact

• MIG-REL-BP-3.3: Plan for failure

Performance efficiency pillar

• MIG-PERF-BP-1.1: Understand the performance characteristics of your current infrastructure to select the best performant optimized cloud infrastructure

• MIG-PERF-BP-2.1: Evaluate operating systems and versions that are running in your environment

• MIG-PERF-BP-3.1: Evaluate the different methods to migrate data and select the one best for you use case: online mode, offline mode, or hybrid approach

• MIG-PERF-BP-4.1: Select the storage solution based on the characteristics of your workloads

• MIG-PERF-BP-4.2: Choose the optimal storage solutions for specialized workloads, such as SAP and VMware cloud on AWS

• MIG-PERF-BP-4.3: Evaluate the different storage tiers at prices to meet your migrated workload's performance

• MIG-PERF-BP-5.1: Establish a reliable network connectivity from on-premises to AWS to ensure performance

• MIG-PERF-BP-5.2: Assure that network performance is not impacted by external factors

Cost optimization pillar

• MIG-COST-BP-1.1: Thoroughly assess existing infrastructure usage and application dependencies prior to migration

• MIG-COST-BP-1.2: Leverage AWS programs and workshops designed to remove common blockers and accelerate migrations

Sustainability pillar

• MIG-SUS-BP-1.1: Include sustainability considerations as part of your migration business case and preliminary assessments

• MIG-SUS-BP-2.1: Choose a Region for the workloads you plan to migrate based on your business requirements and your sustainability goals

Mobilize Phase

Operational excellence pillar

• MIG-OPS-BP-2.1 Define and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) which can be shared with all teams involved in the migration

• MIG-OPS-BP-3.1 Invest time and effort to ensure the required migration and operations skills are captured, skills gaps identified, and training plans are implemented and managed

• MIG-OPS-BP-4.1 Build a comprehensive resource model for your migration that reflects the demands of the migration as well as the regular activities

• MIG-OPS-BP-5.1 Build a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team within your organization as part of your migration planning

• MIG-OPS-BP-6.1 Define Cloud Operations Strategy: understand your current operating model, processes and tools, and explore how to implement them efficiently, securely and reliably in the cloud to create your cloud operations strategy

• MIG-OPS-BP-6.2 Align AWS operational requirements with your existing tools and identify any gaps

• MIG-OPS-BP-6.3 Regularly test your operations in the cloud

• MIG-OPS-BP-7.1 Calculate your potential migration velocity using both technical and non-technical perspectives (like network bandwidth, team availability, volume of changes, and change freezes)

Security pillar

• MIG-SEC-BP-4.1 Implement strong identity and least privilege principles

• MIG-SEC-BP-5.1 Implement AWS multi-account structure

• MIG-SEC-BP-6.1 Establish secure connectivity to AWS 

• MIG-SEC-BP-6.2: Establish network security controls 

• MIG-SEC-BP-7.1 Establish security controls for protecting data at rest

• MIG-SEC-BP-8.1: Establish application layer security controls

• MIG-SEC-BP-8.2: Optimize application security with AWS Application Migration Service

• MIG-SEC-BP-9.1: Establish a data backup and restore strategy

• MIG-SEC-BP-9.2: Establish a Disaster recovery plan

• MIG-SEC-BP-10.1: Validate and use AWS native monitoring tools.

• MIG-SEC-BP-10.2: Explore cloud native AWS partner monitoring tools

• MIG-SEC-BP-11.1: Perform third-party integration due diligence

Reliability pillar

• MIG-REL-BP-4.1: Be aware of service quotas and constraints for migration services

• MIG-REL-BP-4.2: Estimate the impact of new workloads on existing service quotas across accounts and Regions

• MIG-REL-BP-4.3: Be aware of unchangeable service quotas and how you determine which accounts or VPCs workloads use

• MIG-REL-BP-5.1: Provide sufficient bandwidth for normal and traffic from data replication

• MIG-REL-BP-5.2: Assure that links and equipment to on-premises are highly available

• MIG-REL-BP-5.3: Verify that your network design enables communication between on-premises and cloud networks

• MIG-REL-BP-5.4: Use an IP scheme that allows for sufficient growth within cloud workloads and burst auto-scaling

• MIG-REL-BP-5.5: Complete a reliable DNS design that enables resolutions to existing domains, plus new domains in AWS

• MIG-REL-BP-5.6: Test network performance prior to migration

• MIG-REL-BP-5.7: Test network component failure

• MIG-REL-BP-6.1: Identify and back up all data that needs to be backed up, or reproduce the data from sources

• MIG-REL-BP-7.1: Deploy the workload to multiple locations

Performance efficiency pillar

• MIG-PERF-BP-6.1: Identify a migration strategy for your network components (DNS, IP addressing, and DHCP) migration

• MIG-PERF-BP-7.1: Identify the right CloudWatch metrics to capture or detect anomaly and identify performance blockers for shared services

• MIG-PERF-BP-7.2: Select the best performing cloud infrastructure that can scale for additional workloads in future without any performance impact

• MIG-PERF-BP-7.3: Reduce the blast radius for performance impact into a single account

• MIG-PERF-BP-7.4: Benchmark existing workloads for performance

Cost optimization pillar

• MIG-COST-BP-2.1: Leverage existing tools to automate your migration

• MIG-COST-BP-2.2: Minimize the number of applications and the amount of data that is migrated

• MIG-COST-BP-2.3: Right-size your replication servers to prevent bottlenecks without over-provisioning

• MIG-COST-BP-3.1: Plan and set up cost and usage governance of AWS resources with help of IAM policies

• MIG-COST-BP-3.2: Define a cost allocation strategy that meets your organizations specific financial management process

• MIG-COST-BP-3.3: Design a strategy to monitor, track and analyze your AWS cost and usage as you move resources to AWS

Sustainability pillar

• MIG-SUS-BP-3.1: Focus on efficiency across all aspects of infrastructure

• MIG-SUS-BP-4.1: Adopt metrics that can signal the sustainability of your application

• MIG-SUS-BP-4.2: Include sustainability metrics in the application portfolio analysis to drive migration and modernization initiatives

• MIG-SUS-BP-5.1: Implement efficient workload design by leveraging the underlying infrastructure.

• MIG-SUS-BP-6.1: Identify environments and workloads that can be consolidated or retired

• MIG-SUS-BP-6.2: Identify workloads that can use efficient software and architecture patterns to maintain consistent high utilization of deployed resources

• MIG-SUS-BP-6.3: Analyze your data access patterns and data lifecycle processes, and evaluate how you can become more efficient and sustainable in your data management

• MIG-SUS-BP-6.4: Understand and influence business requirements, and optimize areas of code to reach your sustainability goals

Migrate Phase

Operational excellence pillar

• MIG-OPS-BP-8.1 Ensure you have a testing strategy in place

• MIG-OPS-BP-9.1 Determine if your current CI/CD pipeline works on AWS

• MIG-OPS-BP-9.2 Provision resources through infrastructure as code (IaC) templates

Security pillar

• MIG-SEC-BP-12.1: Understand the data security and compliance 

• MIG-SEC-BP-13.1: Understand AWS service capabilities for event detection and investigation

• MIG-SEC-BP-14.1: Understand AWS best practices for incident response

• MIG-SEC-BP-15.1: Protect your network resources

• MIG-SEC-BP-16.1: Manage authentication for applications and databases

Reliability pillar

• MIG-REL-BP-8.1 Before the cut-over, test HA and FT for the migrated workloads, and perform a DR dry-run after the migration

Performance efficiency pillar

• MIG-PERF-BP-8.1: Perform stress and user acceptance tests on migrated workloads before the actual cutover.

• MIG-PERF-BP-8.2: Review and implement the lessons learned from previous migration waves

• MIG-PERF-BP-8.3: Perform a Well-Architected Framework Review on each iteration of the migrated workload.

• MIG-PERF-BP-9.1: Generate alarm-based notifications for metric's threshold breach

• MIG-PERF-BP-9.2: Determine the need for a real-time or a near real-time monitoring solution

• MIG-PERF-BP-9.3: Implement CloudWatch or a Quicksight dashboard as a single pane view for visualizing all metrics

• MIG-PERF-BP-9.4: Set up automated testing for your application metrics

• MIG-PERF-BP-9.5: Re-evaluate your compute usage with AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Compute Optimizer, or partner tools

Cost optimization pillar

• MIG-COST-BP-4.1: Create a deliberate metrics strategy to help demystify cloud economics

• MIG-COST-BP-4.2: Monitor spend and limit unintended or unnecessary costs with budgeting and forecasting tools

• MIG-COST-BP-4.3: Use AWS Cost Anomaly Detection in Cost Explorer to quickly improve cost controls

• MIG-COST-BP-4.4: Use dashboards that provide pre-built visualizations to help you get a detailed view of your AWS usage and costs as you move resources to AWS

• MIG-COST-BP-5.1: Leverage the right purchase options and scalable architecture for your workloads

• MIG-COST-BP-5.2: Identify resources during migration that are likely candidates for cost optimizations later

• MIG-COST-BP-6.1: Use automation to re-evaluate your compute usage periodically

• MIG-COST-BP-7.1: Create a plan early to optimize after the initial migration

Sustainability pillar

• MIG-SUS-BP-7.1: Implement data management practices

• MIG-SUS-BP-8.1: Adopt methods that can reduce interim resource consumption during the migration