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But lift and shift is not that, is it? It's having applications running directly on OSs (without containerisation or separation of dependencies like the database or physical disks) and moving it to "the cloud" to be ran on a VM in the same fashion.

I mean, if you're already with AWS using their services (besides EC2 for hosting) such as RDS or S3; moving to Azure SQL (or DB for MySQL or whatever) and Blob Storage is not just lift-and-shift anymore, since you are actually changing from a cloud provider to a different one.

AFAIK an actual migration to the cloud would involve rewriting some parts of the application to be cloud-native, such as using Service Bus for queues instead of a local Redis/RabbitMQ instance, using GCS instead of local disks, and using RDS instead of hosting your own single MySQL server.



There's no formal definition of "lift and shift", certainly nothing that would dictate specific virtualization strategies.

I've always read it as being roughly analogous to "like for like," and dependent on the specific circumstances and status quo.




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