Cloud Engineering

Cloud Migration

A field-tested migration playbook across AWS, Azure, and GCP—covering strategy, landing zones, networking, identity, and modernization—so you exit the datacenter without exploding cost, risk, or team capacity.

Landing zones Network & identity App portfolio Migration waves Cost & guardrails

Executive Summary

A migration you can explain to your board in one slide.

We anchor the migration around three measurable outcomes:

  • Cost: predictable run-rate vs. “lift-and-shift surprise”.
  • Risk: controlled cutovers, rehearsed rollback, tested DR.
  • Speed: a reusable landing zone and playbook for future waves.
If you do a “lift & shift”
  • • 10–20% infra savings at best, often higher total cost.
  • • Legacy ops model dragged into the cloud.
  • • No repeatable pattern for the next 50 apps.
If you treat it as a product
  • • 25–40% cost improvement vs. DC baseline over time.
  • • Hardened landing zone used by multiple BUs.
  • • Migration scorecard you can share with ELT/Board.

Why cloud migration still fails in 2025

Most failed migrations look identical: a date is announced, everything is lifted as-is, costs spike, and reliability regresses. Teams then spend the next 18 months fixing problems that could have been designed out from the start.

The issue is rarely “cloud vs. on-prem.” It’s migrating without a clear business case, a stable landing zone, or a repeatable pattern for subsequent waves.

For technology leaders

As a CTO or VP of Engineering, your biggest risk isn’t whether a single cutover works— it’s whether the migration program stays credible after the first 3–4 waves.

  • What you can delegate: tooling, detailed runbooks, individual app plans.
  • What you must own: the migration thesis (why now), risk appetite, and how success is measured.

We make those trade-offs explicit and then design the technical plan around them.

The DevOps City migration approach

1) Strategy & business case

  • Clarify the primary driver: cost, agility, resilience, or expansion—not all three at once.
  • Model scenarios: stay-put vs. rehost vs. replatform vs. refactor, including TCO and risk.
  • Define “done” in measurable terms (e.g., X% workloads moved, Y% cost delta, DR posture).

2) Landing zone & foundations

  • Design cloud landing zones (AWS/Azure/GCP) with identity, networking, and guardrails baked in.
  • Stand up shared services: logging, monitoring, DNS, key management, backup, SSO.
  • Capture it as infrastructure-as-code so it’s repeatable and auditable.

3) Portfolio analysis & migration waves

  • Inventory applications, data stores, integrations, and operational runbooks.
  • Group workloads into waves by risk and business capability, not just org structure.
  • Select 1–2 lighthouse apps to prove the pattern end-to-end before scaling out.

4) Execute, learn, and industrialize

  • Run rehearsal cutovers and rollback drills; log friction, then update the playbook.
  • Automate as much as is sensible: golden images, validation checks, smoke tests.
  • Package the migration as an internal product: templates, FAQs, and office hours.

Sample migration scorecard

Executives don’t need a YAML dump—they need a simple way to see if the migration is working. We help you create a scorecard similar to:

Dimension Baseline (DC) Target (Cloud) Current
Run-rate infra cost 100% 70–75% 78%
Critical incident rate 8 / quarter < 4 / quarter 5 / quarter
Apps migrated 0 / 120 120 / 120 37 / 120
Teams on landing zone 0 All product & platform teams 7 teams

Key benefits

  • Predictable migration waves instead of hero projects.
  • Landing zones you won’t outgrow, ready for future regions and acquisitions.
  • Cost and risk agreed up front with finance and security at the table.
  • Operational readiness baked in—SLOs, DR, and on-call part of the definition of done.

Our accelerators & IP

  • Reference landing zones for AWS, Azure, and GCP aligned with CIS benchmarks.
  • Migration wave planner templates, cutover checklists, and rollback plans.
  • Automated validation for DNS, certificates, connectivity, and basic performance.
  • Cost-projection worksheets that link architecture choices to real cloud invoices.

Competencies & experience

  • Architects with multi-cloud experience in regulated and high-growth environments.
  • Hands-on engineers across networking, identity, databases, and observability.
  • Proven playbooks from datacenter exits, re-platforming, and hybrid models.

How we typically engage

  • Migration assessment (2–4 weeks): portfolio map, landing-zone gap analysis, and executive-level roadmap.
  • First-wave delivery (8–16 weeks): co-delivery with your teams for 1–3 lighthouse workloads.
  • Playbook & enablement: training, docs, and clinics so internal teams can own future waves.