Launch & Migrate
A starter migration offering that helps startups and small businesses move into AWS with a clear plan, guardrails, and confidence — instead of a risky “lift and hope” approach.
From on-prem to AWS, safely
The focus of this project is not just “getting to the cloud,” but arriving there with the essentials in place: networking, security, observability, and a migration plan that business leaders actually understand.
Role
Cloud Architect · Migration Lead
Tech Stack
AWS (VPC, IAM, EC2/RDS), Landing Zone patterns, VPN/Direct Connect, CI/CD, Observability
Highlights
Structured migration playbook · Security & cost guardrails · Business-friendly communication
Overview
Many teams treat “moving to the cloud” as a one-time technical event. In this engagement, we treated migration as a planned product: a set of repeatable steps that land workloads in AWS without surprising the business, security team, or finance.
We started with a short discovery: current environments, compliance constraints, operational maturity, and appetite for change. From there, we designed a migration approach that balanced risk, speed, and future maintainability.
Migration architecture
The target state was a lightweight landing zone built for a small team, but with patterns that scale later:
- Network foundation: A hub-and- spoke VPC design with separate subnets for app, data, and shared services, connected to on-prem via VPN/Direct Connect.
- Guardrails: AWS IAM, SCP starter set, and baseline CloudTrail/Config rules to catch risky changes early.
- Workload move pattern: A repeatable “lift & improve” path that standardised how we containerised or re-platformed each app, including golden images and IaC templates.
- Observability first: Basic dashboards and alerts aligned to what the business actually cares about — uptime, latency, and error rates.
Sample migration run
Each application followed the same playbook. Here is a simplified illustration of the steps we used when moving a production API:
1. Capture baseline: traffic, latency, error rates, infra footprint
2. Stand up target VPC, subnets, security groups, and database
3. Deploy application into AWS (canary or blue/green, depending on risk)
4. Mirror production traffic through AWS and compare metrics
5. Cut over DNS with tight rollback plan and communication script
6. Decommission on-prem resources only after stability window passesImpact
The client moved their first production workloads into AWS without emergency calls, midnight cutovers, or surprise bills. Leadership had a clear view of what was moving and why, and teams gained a playbook they could reuse for future apps.
More importantly, the migration left behind a healthy platform: security guardrails, cost visibility, and enough observability that new incidents became easier to reason about — not harder.