Rehosting (Lift & Shift) — Deep Dive

Rehosting moves your applications to the cloud with minimal modifications. This approach is ideal when you need to vacate a data center quickly, reduce hardware costs, or establish a cloud footprint before deeper modernization.

When to Choose Rehosting:

Data center lease expiring or hardware end-of-life
Applications with few dependencies on underlying OS
Need for immediate disaster recovery capabilities
Compliance requirements mandate cloud hosting

Typical Lift & Shift Timeline:

Week 1–2: Infrastructure assessment & VM inventory
Week 3–4: Network design & security baseline
Week 5–8: Phased VM migration with validation
Week 9–10: DNS cutover & performance testing
Week 11–12: Decommission legacy & optimize

Refactoring — Deep Dive

Refactoring involves re-architecting your application to fully leverage cloud-native capabilities. This means breaking monoliths into microservices, adopting serverless patterns, and implementing cloud-managed services for databases, caching, and messaging.

Key Refactoring Patterns

Strangler Fig: Incrementally replace monolith components
CQRS: Separate read/write models for scalability
Event Sourcing: Track all state changes as immutable events
API Gateway: Centralize routing, auth, and rate limiting

Refactoring Delivers

70% faster release cycles
50% infrastructure cost savings
99.99% availability achievable
10x scaling capacity

Re platforming — Deep Dive

Re platforming strikes the balance between speed and optimization. You make targeted improvements during migration — like swapping self-managed databases for cloud-managed services, or containerizing applications — without a complete application rewrite.

Common Replatforming Moves

SQL Server → Azure SQL / RDS / Cloud SQL
VMs → Containers on managed Kubernetes
Self-hosted Redis → ElastiCache / Memorystore
On-prem file storage → Blob / S3 / GCS