Migrating to AWS: A Manager's Guide

Chapter 8. Refactoring, Retooling, and Final Preparations

Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.

Dr. Wayne Dyer, A Conversation with Wayne Dyer

With the bulk of your planning effort completed during Chapter 7, we will now move on to looking one last time at your applications for refactoring opportunities. To recap what we covered in Chapter 4, refactoring is making significant application design changes to adopt cloud-native technologies and services. I have been beating my drum about the power of lifting and shifting your infrastructure to AWS as fast as possible to help reduce your double spend during the process. It would be a huge disservice not to talk about refactoring your applications and gaining some benefit from those changes. We want to look for easy changes with maximum impact on your business but low impact on your timeline and budget.

Once we cover refactoring, we will move on to what I call retooling. Retooling isn’t as drastic as refactoring. You will make changes to your application’s code. However, there are capabilities in AWS that you can bolt onto existing applications to increase their availability and performance for your customers and decrease even more management overhead. Finally, we will cover the final preparations required for migrating applications, the application deep-dive analysis.

Refactoring

You will probably have no trouble getting your development teams onboard with refactoring your applications. It is new ...