Migration strategies
The seven Rs: rehost (lift and shift), replatform (small optimisations), refactor, repurchase (move to SaaS), retire, retain and relocate. Most large programmes rehost first to exit a data centre, then refactor selectively where the return is clear.
Landing zones and governance
A landing zone is the pre-built account structure: organisation hierarchy, guardrail policies, network baseline, centralised logging and identity federation. Build it before workloads arrive or you will retrofit governance across hundreds of accounts.
Lock-in, honestly
Portability has a price. Containers, open protocols and IaC keep options open cheaply; abstracting every managed service behind a lowest-common-denominator layer usually costs more than it saves. Data gravity — the cost and time of moving petabytes — is the real constraint.