AWS Migration Checklist
A practical checklist for assessing, planning, migrating, and optimizing workloads before moving to AWS.
Discovery and readiness
- List applications, databases, servers, dependencies, owners, and business criticality.
- Map current performance, uptime needs, RTO, RPO, compliance requirements, and licensing constraints.
- Choose the right migration path for each workload: rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, or retain.
AWS landing zone
- Prepare AWS Organizations, accounts, IAM roles, VPC design, subnets, routing, and security boundaries.
- Enable centralized logging, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, backup policies, monitoring, and tagging standards.
- Define cost controls, budgets, alerts, reserved capacity planning, and FinOps ownership.
Migration execution
- Run pilot migrations before production workloads and validate rollback procedures.
- Plan secure data transfer, backup, replication, DNS, cutover windows, and stakeholder communication.
- Test application performance, security controls, integrations, access, and operational runbooks.