Migrating to AWS: A Manager's Guide

Part I. Migration Foundation

Welcome to the first part of Migrating to AWS: A Manager’s Guide. In this portion of the book, we will talk about the foundational aspects of migration. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the benefits and the risks of AWS, and how to mitigate them. During these two chapters, we will build a detailed understanding of these concepts and create key deliverables that enable you to communicate this information effectively to other constituents throughout the company. Migration to AWS isn’t a project that you tackle only with the IT department. Other migrations you may have done in the past, such as migrating from physical to virtual servers, or migration of one VMware-based data center to another, could remain compartmentalized within IT. Migrating to AWS allows your company to become more agile and increase business value. To facilitate these capabilities, you will need the cooperation of the entire organization. Compartmentalizing within IT should not occur while migrating to AWS, nor would it be advisable, because you will not reap the maximum benefit. We will cover agility and business value benefits in depth in Chapter 1.

I want to take this opportunity to clarify the use of some language used in the book. Throughout this book, there will be two words that I use extensively, spend and compute. They will, however, appear in a different context than you are familiar with seeing. Before the cloud, spend and compute were mostly used as verbs, as in I have to compute ...