To do, or not to do - that is the question…

Many a technical officer is faced with a tough decision when contemplating their cloud migration strategy: should they refactor their existing applications to take full advantage of the cloud services and architecture, or should they simply rehost ("lift-and-shift") their existing infrastructure as-is?

 
Fortunately, today we are not limited to just those two choices. Various possibilities, along with their respective pros and cons, are outlined by Mike Chan in his concise but informative post: https://www.thorntech.com/2017/01/5-strategies-migrating-applications-cloud/

A rehost strategy certainly has its place, especially in situations when the team does not have a great deal of familiarity with the cloud architecture. Speaking from personal experience, having facilitated lift-and-shift migrations both in-house and for multiple clients, they tend to be relatively fast and painless, with minimum to no service interruptions and they show immediate operating expense savings. As such, a rehost migration is a solid first step towards further optimization and refactoring of your services that minimizes both the expense and time to implement.