AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Announcing The AWS Well-Architected Migration Lens

Today, we are delighted to announce the launch of the AWS Well-Architected Migration Lens White Paper and the Migration Lens in the Lens Catalog in the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool). The Migration Lens extends the AWS Well-Architected Framework to include best practices and implementation guidance that you can apply to your migration program across the three migration phases: Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate.

The Lens Catalog is a central lens repository in the AWS WA Tool that offers the latest technology and industry-focused best practices from AWS. By using the Migration Lens, you can perform a Migration specific Well-Architected Framework Review using the AWS WA Tool.

Since 2015, the AWS Well-Architected Framework has been helping AWS customers and partners improve their cloud architectures. The framework consists of design principles, questions, and best practices across multiple pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. Using the framework cloud architects, system architects, engineers, and developers can build secure, high-performance, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads.

The Migration Lens joins a collection of lenses that focus on specialized workloads such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Gaming Industry, Machine Learning (ML), SAP, and Serverless Applications.  You can find here more information on AWS Well-Architected Lenses.

What is the Migration Lens?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework Migration Lens is a collection of customer-proven, time-tested design principles and best practices to help you align your migration to AWS best practices across the migration phases. We base our recommendations on our insights from supporting thousands of customers through their large-scale cloud transformation projects and our own Migration Specialist communities.

Migration Lens components

The Migration Lens includes 3 primary areas: Well-Architected Migration Design Principles, Migration Phases and Well-Architected Pillars, and Best Practices.

1. Well-Architected Migration Design Principles

A collection of general migration principles that serve as foundational guidelines for your migration process.  Although enterprise’s organizational structure and business objectives vary between customers, specific patterns and practices we learned tend to be true for every kind of company and migration. Migration design principles are high-level guidance we recommend following for a successful migration.

2. AWS Migration Phases and the Well-Architected Framework Pillars

This considers details of the AWS Migration Phases, aligning design strategies with the pillars of the overarching Well-Architected Framework.

2.1 AWS Migration Phases:

  • Assess: Evaluate your existing environment, discern needs and requirements, and pinpoint the advantages of transitioning to the cloud. It takes an initial look at your portfolio, and confirm that the key stakeholders in your organization are aligned.
  • Mobilize: This phase is all about preparation. It demands comprehensive planning, the formulation of a migration strategy, and the commencement of groundwork for your AWS setup. You typically build your AWS landing zone, conduct a more thorough portfolio assessment, build your security and operating model, and prepare teams for change.
  • Migrate: The tangible migration phase. Here, applications, data, and workloads transition to AWS based on the pre-devised strategy. Rigorous testing is imperative in this phase to ascertain the seamless functioning post-migration.

2.2. Well-Architected Framework Pillars for migration: 

The AWS Well-Architected Framework contains six pillars that address the aspects required to create workload architectures that is well architected.

  • Operational Excellence: Focuses on benefits realization, honing organizational capabilities, ensuring bandwidth for migration execution, pinpointing operational prerequisites for the target environment, and monitoring migration velocity.
  • Security: Focuses on safeguarding migrated workloads, this pillar emphasizes best practices in security foundations, identity & access management, detective controls, incident response, and application security post-migration.
  • Reliability: Focuses on building reliability into your AWS workload. Reliability foundations, workload architecture, change management, and managing failures are key considerations.
  • Performance Efficiency: Focuses on efficient utilization of cloud resources to meet your migration and organization goals, especially when making trade-off decisions regarding migration.
  • Cost Optimization: Focuses on cost efficiency by avoiding redundant expenses and pinpointing ways to economize the migration. Elements like cloud financial management, awareness of expenditure & usage, resource cost-effectiveness, and ongoing optimization are critical.
  • Sustainability: Focuses on reducing the environmental footprint of your migrated workload. It covers region selection, alignment with demand, and sustainable processes & culture.

3. Best Practices

Each migration phase consists of best practices that apply across the Well-Architected Framework pillars, regardless of your technological context. The best practices are accompanied by:

3.1. Implementation Guidance: Detailed AWS implementation suggestions and specific recommendations on how to realize realizing each best practice, complete with references to AWS tools and resources.

3.2. Resources: A curated list of links spanning AWS documentation, blogs, and videos that support the best practices and their associated implementation strategies.

Who should use the Migration Lens?

All AWS customers designing or implementing a migration to AWS Cloud and searching for guidance regarding best practices and things to consider as part of the move can leverage the Migration Lens. This includes start-ups, digital native businesses, software vendors, enterprises, or public sector companies.

When evaluating your migration, we recommend the following stakeholders to review the lens:

  • Business and technology leaders
  • Migration project team
  • Security and compliance team members
  • Operations teams
  • Enterprise and Solutions Architects

Next steps

The AWS Well-Architected Migration Lens is available now in the AWS Documentation to use in a self-service fashion. Contact your AWS account team to engage a migration specialist solution architect if you require additional expert guidance.

Learn more about AWS Migrations, customer case studies, and additional resources on our Cloud Migration website.

Ebrahim (EB) Khiyami

EB is a Senior Solutions Architect with AWS. He is a specialist on Cloud Optimization and an SME on Migration and Disaster Recovery.

Damien Renner

Damien Renner is a Senior Product Manager who specializes in large scale migrations. He is a subject matter expert in delivering digital transformation, helping customers across multiple industries to achieve their target business outcomes.

Mike Kuznetsov

Mike Kuznetsov is a Principal Migration and Modernization Solutions Architect at AWS. He works with large enterprise customers helping them to rehost and modernize applications at scale as they migrate to AWS. He enjoys solving complex technical challenges to unblock customer migrations. In his free time, he loves to spent time with his family and spark curiosity in his kids.