Lift and Shift

Move applications to the cloud as they are, change them later, maybe.

Quick Definition

Lift and shift is a cloud migration strategy that moves applications to the cloud with minimal changes. It is fast and low-risk but often carries over on-premises inefficiencies, so migrated workloads frequently need later optimization to realize cloud cost benefits.

Lift and shift is a migration strategy that moves applications from a data center to the cloud with minimal change: the same servers become virtual machines, the same architecture, just running on rented hardware. It is the fastest route to the cloud and usually the first one large enterprises take.

The speed has a price. Applications designed for fixed hardware do not use what makes cloud economical: elasticity, managed services, consumption pricing. A lifted application typically runs on oversized always-on instances, and many companies see bills higher than their data center costs and conclude the cloud is expensive, when the architecture is what is expensive.

Example. An insurer lifts 300 servers to the cloud in six months to exit a data center lease. The bill is 20 percent above projections. A follow-up wave of rightsizing, scheduling, and moving databases to managed services brings it down 35 percent over the next year.

Treat lift and shift as phase one with a funded phase two of optimization, not as the destination. The AWS migration tools roundup covers tooling, and the Cloud Cost Management Guide covers the cleanup.