The Cloud Migration Checklist I Wish I Had: 12 Steps, 6 Phases, and the Mistakes That Cost Money

Cloud migration is presented as a 12-step process across six phases—discovery, decision-making, design, migration, cutover, and ongoing operations—with emphasis on completing inventories, dependency maps, and cost and performance baselines before moving workloads. The guidance recommends selecting one of the 7 Rs migration strategies for each application, using pilot waves of low-risk systems, and building a codified landing zone with identity controls, networking, tagging, security guardrails, CI/CD, and rollback plans before large-scale migration. It identifies incomplete dependency mapping, unoptimized lift-and-shift migrations, untagged resources, continuously running non-production environments, and unplanned network charges as common sources of delays and cost overruns. Data migration and cutover should be chosen according to downtime tolerance, validated against pre-migration baselines, and supported by rehearsed rollback procedures and deliberate source-system decommissioning. For portfolios of 20 to 50 applications, the proposed timeline includes roughly four weeks for discovery and business-case development, four to six weeks for landing-zone work, a pilot around weeks six to ten, followed by rolling migration waves and continuous post-migration optimization. The piece also stresses that migration creates an enduring operational responsibility for deployments, access, infrastructure upgrades, resilience, and FinOps, which organizations can address through internal platforms, cloud-native services, managed PaaS offerings, or developer platforms such as Qovery.

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