Migration & Modernization

Infrastructure Migrations: Your complete AWS re:Invent 2026 guide

Moving off on-premises infrastructure used to mean months of discovery spreadsheets, dependency mapping workshops, and hand-built wave plans before a single server moved. At AWS re:Invent 2026, running November 30 to December 4 in Las Vegas, you can see how agentic AI is changing that. AWS Transform uses purpose-built AI agents to automate the migration lifecycle, from discovery and wave planning through network conversion and cutover, for workloads across VMware, bare metal, and hybrid environments. The same agentic approach keeps working after you land, helping you modernize and reduce tech debt across your portfolio. 

We have curated the sessions that matter most if you are planning or running a migration to AWS. They range from executive panels and customer stories to hands-on workshops where you run a migration yourself. Whether you are building the business case for a data center exit, choosing a migration path for each workload, or scaling a program already underway, there is a session here for where you are today. And because some customers want the scale of AWS but need to keep running on VMware with the tools and skills their teams already have, we also cover Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) for running VMware Cloud Foundation on AWS as-is. We also look at how to continue from migration into modernization once your workloads are on AWS. 

Looking for Microsoft workloads? Sessions on Windows Server, SQL Server, and .NET are covered in our companion post, Microsoft workloads on AWS: Your complete re:Invent 2026 guide. 

Migration Strategies and Customer Stories 

The hardest part of a migration is deciding what moves first, getting leadership to commit, and keeping the business running while you move. In these sessions, IT leaders from organizations that have done it share the planning decisions, sequencing, and lessons learned that got them there.

How IT leaders actually pulled off their cloud migrations | MAM201 | Level: 200
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 8:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Migration leaders from global organizations such as Verisk Analytics, CI Financial, and CoupangPay, share how they moved their on-premises environments to AWS, including workloads off VMware and other aging infrastructure. Hear the real planning decisions, execution strategies, and lessons learned — and where they are headed next with modernization. 

Building migration readiness when the timeline is tight | MAM208 | Level: 200
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Tuesday, Dec 1 4:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Licensing changes, compliance requirements, or rising hardware costs can compress a migration timeline fast. Learn how to assess your environment, build team capability, and match the right pathway to each workload. Hear from Vanguard, which moved hundreds of applications under real pressure with zero critical outages. 

Booking.com’s playbook for cloud transformation at global scale | MAM203 | Level: 200
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 8:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace 
Booking.com connects millions of travelers to over 28 million listings across 43 languages, and its cloud transformation had to match that scale. Hear how they dissolved silos, compressed timelines, and embedded AI from the ground up — and leave with a playbook for turning cloud transformation into lasting competitive advantage. 

Fanatics path to AWS: 5 data centers, 1,800 servers, 48% savings | MAM320 | Level: 300
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Wednesday, Dec 2 2:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Fanatics Commerce migrated 1,800 servers across five data centers with a projected 48% infrastructure savings. Their team shares the structured OLA-to-MAP sequence, an AI-assisted dependency mapping approach that surfaced undocumented connections, and a phased AWS Transform strategy that earned engineering trust before scaling. 

Multicloud-to-AWS transformation: HealthEdge migrating 8,700 servers | MAM226 | Level: 200
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Tuesday, Dec 1 1:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
HealthEdge is consolidating 8,700 servers, 1,600 databases, and thousands of cloud services from Azure, GCP, and four data centers onto AWS via AWS Transform. Hear how they are executing a two-year roadmap serving 130 health plans daily, raising their security bar, and building internal AWS expertise without disrupting the business. 

Assess and Plan: Build Your Migration Business Case 

Every successful migration starts with an accurate picture of what you run today. These sessions show how to turn discovery data into right-sized recommendations, cost scenarios, and a business case your stakeholders will approve — using the agentic assessment capabilities in AWS Transform or working with AWS specialists and AWS Partners. 

On-premises to AWS readiness: foundational decisions before your migration | MAM210 | Level: 200
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 9:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1 12:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Successful migrations are shaped by decisions made before the first workload moves. Explore how choices in licensing, operating models, architecture, and organizational readiness influence outcomes — and learn to assess dependencies, align stakeholders, and build a plan that avoids common pitfalls. 

How to assess your environment to migrate & modernize with confidence | MAM211 | Level: 200
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 10:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1 11:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Without a clear picture of what is running in your environment, teams carry forward outdated assumptions and inherit tech debt. Learn how to go hands-on with AWS Transform’s agentic assessment, or work with AWS specialists and partners, to make informed decisions, optimize environments, and eliminate redundant licensing. 

Build a data-driven migration plan with AWS Transform | MAM306 | Level: 300
Type: Builders’ session
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 10:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Repeat: Thursday, Dec 3 11:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Planning a data center exit means persuasive data, realistic cost estimates, and a proposal that makes financial sense. Use AWS Transform’s agentic AI with Discovery Agent data to assess your environment, generate cost estimates, and build a business case — working the full workflow from discovery to financial modeling. 

Product Deep Dives and Hands-on Workshops: AWS Transform 

See AWS Transform for migrations in action, then use it yourself. These sessions cover the full lifecycle: AI-driven discovery and wave planning, landing zone and network automation, server rehost to Amazon EC2, containerization, and storage migration. Workshops and builders’ sessions are hands-on, so bring your laptop. 

5 steps to faster data center exits with AWS Transform | MAM327 | Level: 300
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Tuesday, Dec 1 11:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
AWS Transform uses agentic AI to compress the entire data center exit, from AI-powered discovery that right-sizes thousands of servers and builds a business case in days, through automated wave planning, landing zone deployment, network conversion, and rehost to Amazon EC2 at scale. We follow one customer’s real timeline from plan to exit. 

What’s new with AWS Transform for migrations | MAM225 | Level: 200
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Wednesday, Dec 2 2:30 PM PST | MGM Grand
Get a first look at the latest AWS Transform for migrations capabilities. With agentic AI working across the migration lifecycle, Transform automates what previously slowed teams down. Whether you are planning a first migration or scaling across hundreds of workloads, leave knowing how to put the newest capabilities into practice. 

Large-scale VMware exit: engineering a 10,000+ server migration wave engine | MAM415 | Level: 400
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 2:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
A structured VMware exit spans assessment, mobilization, migration, and modernization. See how AWS Transform drives outcomes at each phase — portfolio assessment that quantifies TCO reduction, wave planning that protects uptime, and automated cutover — with real examples of teams compressing 18-month timelines to ten months or less. 

Drive multi-server migrations from discovery to cutover with AWS Transform | MAM308 | Level: 300
Type: Workshop
Date & Location: Wednesday, Dec 2 8:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Repeat: Thursday, Dec 3 12:30 PM PST | MGM Grand
Most teams spend more time planning migration handoffs than moving workloads. In this workshop, experience how AWS Transform’s agentic AI orchestrates the full lifecycle — intelligent discovery, AI-driven wave planning, automated network translation, and server rehost — with specialized agents coordinating while you stay in control.  

Best path forward: Rehost & replatform to containers with AWS Transform | MAM315 | Level: 300
Type: Workshop
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 3:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1 12:30 PM PST | MGM Grand
Figuring out which apps to rehost versus containerize is where teams get stuck. Use AWS Transform to plan a combined migration across your portfolio, then execute a mix of container and rehost migrations to Amazon ECS or EKS. Leave with a realistic multi-wave plan you can apply to your own environment.  

Guide to deploying landing zones & modernized networks in hours | MAM331 | Level: 300
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 12:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Repeat: Tuesday, Dec 1 1:30 PM PST | Wynn/Encore
See how AWS Transform’s agentic AI takes landing zone setup and network translation from weeks to hours — from migration inventory to validated landing zones and modernized networks. Watch production-ready account structures deploy through Control Tower and firewall configurations become optimized VPCs, subnets, and security groups. 

Automate your landing zone and network migration with AWS Transform | MAM408 | Level: 400
Type: Workshop
Date & Location: Wednesday, Dec 2 12:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
AWS Transform automates landing zone design and network translation. See the landing zone agent deploy AWS Control Tower, OUs, SCPs, and workload accounts as infrastructure as code, then the network agent translate and deploy VMware networking or firewall configurations into VPCs, subnets, security groups, and transit gateways in CDK or Terraform.  

Migrate and modernize infrastructure from your IDE with agentic AI | MAM313 | Level: 300
Type: Code talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 8:30 AM PST | MGM Grand
Repeat: Wednesday, Dec 2 10:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Drive the full migration workflow from your IDE. See how Kiro and AWS Transform work together: generate a multi-account landing zone as infrastructure as code, feed a VMware configuration export to the network agent for Terraform or CDK network topology, then point the containerization agent at a repo to deploy to Amazon EKS. 

Migrate on-premises storage to AWS with agentic AI | MAM312 | Level: 300
Type: Lightning talk
Date & Location: Wednesday, Dec 2 1:30 PM PST | Wynn/Encore
AWS Transform’s agentic AI handles the full storage migration lifecycle — automated assessment, business case generation, wave planning, and execution — reducing weeks to hours. See how to migrate storage from VMware estates, enterprise databases, and associated data, and leave knowing how to start your first Transform project. 

The EBA cloud party: compete to build agentic migration solutions | MAM307 | Level: 300
Type: Workshop
Date & Location: Thursday, Dec 3 8:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
In this gamified Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) workshop, cross-functional teams compete in real time to architect migration solutions, build agentic AI workflows that automate at scale, and deploy AI-powered applications on AWS. Leave with battle-tested architectures, automation patterns, and a cloud-fluent mindset your team can adopt immediately. 

Product Deep Dives: Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) 

If you renewed your VMware agreement and are now facing hardware refresh cycles, capacity limits, or rising infrastructure costs, Amazon EVS gives you a path forward without rearchitecting. Amazon EVS lets you run VMware Cloud Foundation inside your Amazon VPC on EC2 bare metal instances, so your teams keep using the tools and processes they already know while you shift capital spend to elastic, on-demand infrastructure. These sessions cover deployment, architecture, and storage patterns for running VMware workloads on AWS. 

Amazon EVS: How to deploy & operate your VMware stack in the cloud | MAM325 | Level: 300
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Thursday, Dec 3 12:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Amazon EVS lets you run the latest VMware Cloud Foundation software in your Amazon VPC on EC2 bare-metal instances — keeping control of your virtualization stack from networking and storage to disaster recovery. Walk through deployment workflows and integration patterns, and hear lessons from a customer who fast-tracked their migration with EVS. 

Architect and optimize your VMware environment on Amazon EVS | MAM330 | Level: 300
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 2:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Dive deep into the architectural decisions behind a resilient VMware environment on Amazon EVS: VCF 9 support, Windows Server license-included entitlements, networking and storage designs tuned for performance and cost, and operational patterns for backup, patching, and DR. Hear from a customer running production workloads on EVS. 

Modernizing VMware workloads with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP | STG363 | Level: 300
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 8:30 AM PST | MGM Grand
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a storage foundation built for VMware migrations, with multi-protocol support, enterprise data management, and ONTAP compatibility VMware administrators already know. Explore real-world migration patterns, cost optimization through deduplication and compression, and high availability with Multi-AZ and zero RPO. 

Product Deep Dives: Migrate to AWS Outposts 

Some workloads need to stay on-premises for data residency, digital sovereignty, or low-latency reasons, but you still want a cloud operating model. AWS Outposts brings AWS infrastructure and services into your own data center, and these sessions cover how to migrate and modernize onto it, including the new second-generation hardware. 

VMware migration to Amazon EC2 and AWS Outposts with AWS Transform | HMC308 | Level: 300
Type: Workshop
Date & Location: Tuesday, Dec 1 12:30 PM PST | MGM Grand
Use AWS Transform MGN to execute an end-to-end VMware migration to Amazon EC2 and AWS Outposts, working through AI-driven discovery, dependency mapping, wave planning, network conversion, and orchestrated execution. See how Trianz’s Concierto platform integrates with AWS Transform to streamline migration to AWS Outposts. 

Real-world migrations: Lessons learned migrating to AWS Outposts | HMC304 | Level: 300
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 10:00 AM PST | MGM Grand
For organizations with data residency and sovereignty requirements, this session distills lessons from migrating customers to Outposts across industries and strategies — the processes that delivered results, the mistakes to avoid, and how to pick the right approach. Also covers first-to-second-generation hardware transitions. 

Migrate and modernize workloads with AWS Outposts | HMC319 | Level: 300
Type: Chalk talk
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 1:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
AWS Outposts brings a cloud operating model on-premises for workloads leaving legacy virtualization platforms. Now in second-generation single- and multi-rack offerings with new instance types, Amazon EBS storage, up to 40% better price performance, and enhanced networking. Covers migration and modernization strategies, plus how first-generation customers can upgrade. 

AWS wherever you need it: From the cloud to the edge | HMC202 | Level: 200
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Wednesday, Dec 2 3:00 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Some workloads must stay on-premises or at the edge for low latency, local processing, or data residency. AWS Local Zones, Outposts, Dedicated Local Zones, and AI Factories extend AWS services to those locations. Learn how they accelerate migration and modernization of virtualized, containerized, and bare-metal workloads with on-premises dependencies 

Continue Your Journey: From Migration to Modernization 

Migration is the first step, not the last. Once your workloads run on AWS, the same agentic approach helps you keep reducing tech debt across your portfolio. 

What to do next after your cloud migration | MAM326 | Level: 300
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Thursday, Dec 3 2:30 PM PST | Caesars Palace
Rehosting gets workloads to AWS; this session covers the first 90 days after cutover — stabilizing the environment, building observability on real utilization data, applying auto-scaling and right-sizing to accelerate ROI, and knowing when a workload is ready to modernize versus when to leave it alone. 

Turn your cloud migration into a security transformation | MAM407 | Level: 400
Type: Workshop
Date & Location: Monday, Nov 30 3:30 PM PST | MGM Grand
Repeat: Wednesday, Dec 2 8:30 AM PST | Caesars Palace
Use migration to transform your security posture. With workloads freshly landed on AWS, secure them using sandbox accounts — Amazon GuardDuty for runtime threats, Amazon Inspector for vulnerabilities, and AWS Security Hub to correlate findings — then build an automated remediation pipeline. Leave with a repeatable Day 1 security playbook. Laptop required. 

From migration to continuous modernization: reduce tech debt at scale | MAM344 | Level: 300
Type: Breakout session
Date & Location: Thursday, Dec 3 9:00 AM PST | Caesars Palace
See how agentic AI turns modernization from one-off projects into an always-on practice, evolving pipelines from CI/CD to CI/CD/CM (continuous modernization). Hear how teams compress modernization timelines from years to months while keeping codebases current and AI-ready, with the latest innovations from product leader Neha Goswami. 

Get Ready for AWS re:Invent 2026 

AWS re:Invent 2026 is just around the corner, and it is packed with insights from AWS experts and customers who have successfully migrated their workloads to AWS. Here is your ultimate preparation checklist: 

  • Reserve your seats for the workshops, chalk talks, builders’ sessions, and code talks in the re:Invent event catalog (the breakout sessions and lightning talk in this guide are walk-up only) 
  • Join the conversation on social media using #reInvent2026 

Dive Deeper: Infrastructure migration resources 

Explore these resources to get a head start: 

Stay in the Loop 

Follow @AWSreInvent and keep an eye on the #reInvent hashtag across your favorite social platforms. It is the perfect way to connect with other attendees before the event.

Pro Tip: Session schedules are subject to change. For the most up-to-date information, always refer to the official AWS re:Invent Session Catalog.