Cloud Migration Strategies

Once you understand what the cloud offers, the next question is how an organization actually gets there. This topic covers the practical side of moving to AWS: how to plan the change, how to handle each application, and how to move data that is too large to send over the internet.

Migration is rarely a single step. A large move touches budgets, teams, security, and existing systems, so AWS provides a framework to organize the work and a set of named strategies to apply to each workload. This topic walks through both, plus the physical devices AWS offers when the network alone cannot carry the data.

What This Topic Covers

• the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and its purpose as planning guidance
• the six CAF perspectives and the split between business-focused and technical groups
• the four phases of a cloud transformation: Envision, Align, Launch, Scale
• the 7 Rs migration strategies: retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform, refactor
• how to match each strategy to a workload by the amount of change it requires
• the AWS Snow Family for offline transfer of large datasets and edge computing

Why It Matters

The exam expects you to recognize migration concepts in plain scenarios. If a question describes a company planning its skills, governance, and budget for the cloud, that points to CAF. If it describes moving one application unchanged or rebuilding another, that points to a specific R. Knowing these terms by name lets you answer a common group of questions with confidence.

These ideas also reflect how real migrations run. Teams assess their applications, tag each one with a strategy, and pick the right transfer method for their data and bandwidth. Once you can tell a rehost from a refactor, or know when to ship a Snowball Edge instead of streaming data online, you can follow a migration plan and explain the tradeoffs behind it.