AWS Migration Services

Lift-and-shift (rehosting) is the right approach when your goal is to get off on-premises infrastructure quickly, the application is stable and not cloud-optimised, and the operational benefits of cloud (no hardware to manage, easier backups, faster provisioning) are the primary driver. It is lower cost and lower risk than re-platforming. The application runs on EC2 instead of a physical server. Re-platforming makes sense when the application is a good fit for managed services: a stateless web application that would run more cheaply on ECS or Lambda, a database that benefits from Aurora over self-managed MySQL, or a scheduled job that should be a Lambda function rather than a cron on an EC2 instance. For most migrations, we recommend a phased approach: lift-and-shift first to exit on-prem, then re-platform specific components where the cost-benefit is clear and the risk of re-architecture is manageable.

Data migration is the highest-risk part of any AWS migration. Our approach: assessment first, we document every database, its size, schema, relationships, and data quality issues before any migration work begins. We select the migration method based on the database type and acceptable downtime: dump-and-restore for databases that can tolerate a maintenance window, CDC replication (using AWS DMS or native replication) for databases that need near-zero downtime cutover. All migrations are tested in a staging environment that mirrors production before the live cutover. Automated validation compares row counts, checksums, and data samples between source and destination. The production cutover follows a documented runbook with defined rollback steps. We do not declare migration complete until automated validation passes.

The most common AWS services in our migration work: EC2 for lift-and-shift compute, ECS or EKS for containerised application workloads, RDS for managed relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL), Aurora for higher-throughput relational workloads, S3 for object storage and static assets, Lambda for scheduled jobs and event-driven workloads that fit the serverless execution model, CloudFront for CDN and edge delivery, ALB for load balancing, VPC with public and private subnets for network isolation, IAM for access control, Secrets Manager for credential management, and CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting. Terraform is the infrastructure-as-code tool we use to define and deploy all AWS resources so your environment is reproducible and version-controlled from day one.

A focused first migration, one application or a small cluster of related services, starts at $20,000 to $45,000 at fixed price. This covers the assessment, migration execution, infrastructure-as-code delivery, and post-migration validation. Multi-application programs with legacy dependencies, large database migrations, and multi-region architecture requirements grow to $80,000 or more. The assessment engagement that precedes the quote is what makes a fixed price possible: we price on what we find, not what we assume. Post-migration FinOps is scoped separately and keeps AWS spend below the on-prem equivalent you left behind.