Cloud Transformation Journey
Migrating to the cloud can be a very complex set of tasks for an organization, and so the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework provides us with another valuable tool. It suggests a cloud transformation journey that consists of four phases, as shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2 The Cloud Transformation Journey
These phases are as follows:
Envision phase: In this initial phase of cloud adoption, you work on demonstrating how the cloud will help your business achieve its key business outcomes. This is all about making sure that the new technologies that are adopted will really make a difference. In this phase, AWS recommends that you get together with the key stakeholders in the organization to work with them so that the benefits you all envision can become reality.
Align phase: In this phase, you carefully examine the six foundational capabilities and their perspectives and take an honest look at your organization for gaps and cross-organizational dependencies that may make your migration to the cloud tricky. If you lean into this phase, you will be able to create strategies to make sure you are ready to take full advantage of the many strengths AWS has to offer.
Launch phase: This phase is all about pilots. No, we are not talking about aviation here; we are talking about tests and demonstrations of AWS technologies in the context of a business and its needs. In this launch phase, you should be learning as much as possible from the pilots so that when you are ready to actually migrate, it will be as if you have already performed many of the steps and learned from many of the potential pitfalls.
Scale phase: The launch phase involves building a test and learning from pilots of your migration. This is fine and is certainly valuable, but in the scale phase, it is time to expand those pilots (which tend to be very small in scale) to full production workloads in the cloud. It is no surprise, therefore, that this is the last phase of initial migrations.
Keep in mind that these phases are very much a revolving cycle. For example, your organization might decide to start taking on new products or services (like AI), and the cycle will start over again for these new business areas.
Resources for Migration Support
AWS provides tools that help when you are actually ready to start migrating data and solutions into AWS. This section covers just a few of the many that are available.