Migrating to AWS: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 7. Planning Your Migration

Well, we have finally made it to planning your migration. We have covered all the required preliminary work and can now get to the meat of the process. Migration planning will consume a lot of the information you have already gathered as part of your discovery process, which we covered in Chapter 3. The discovery information not only forms the rough version of your plan, but also helps you maintain the constraints between dependencies as you refine your plan. However, before we can start, we need to review a few things, such as what kind of methodologies to use for the plan, plus blockers and changes in your business that have occurred since you started the overall process. Once we address these items, we can move forward with developing a comprehensive migration plan. To start the process, let’s look at what types of companies need a plan.

Who Needs a Plan

Not every migration needs a plan. Let me rephrase: not every migration needs a documented plan. If you are a small business and have only a handful of servers, you can probably create a plan in your head. If you do not fall into the small-business category, you will need a migration plan. The larger your estate, the more complex your plan becomes. Unfortunately, the complexity is not linear, either. With the increase in application sprawl, you will experience exponential growth in complexity. The more applications you have, the greater the level of interconnectivity between them. You will ...