cloud-migration

Five stop conditions, checked 4 October 2026. If the SLO is met and the only pain is a bill, modernization is the wrong program. Continue only when change rate, a seam, or a renewal forces it.

AWS Transform is several products. Continuous modernization went generally available on 3 August 2026. Pick one primary capability for the estate, or the program runs two campaigns at once.

For a mid-market software estate (~280 VMs, $340k/yr Broadcom renewal), splitting 60% MGN rehost + 25% EVS relocate + 15% replatform cut parallel-run from 22 to 16 weeks — without forcing one hypervisor strategy.

A lift-and-shift migration copies on-prem specs sized for peak plus headroom, then the migration partner rolls off and nobody owns the bill. The waste is predictable: 30–60% of cost untagged, over-provisioned EC2/RDS, idle NAT Gateways and orphaned EBS, and commitments bought on top of all of it. This is the explicit migration→FinOps handoff — owner first, visibility second, right-size before you commit — with a 30-day checklist and an optimization-backlog CSV.

A composite mid-market manufacturer exited a colo of 150 workloads and ~400 TB in 21 months across 8 waves, with 47 minutes of unplanned cutover downtime (industry median per Gartner: ~4 hours per major cutover). The single-wave alternative bid came in at ~$4.8M; the wave-based program ran ~$2.1M. Here is how the wave plan, dependency cutoff, and rollback layer fit together against a hard landlord deadline.

July 2026: EU Data Act switching charges hit zero by 12 Jan 2027; AWS free DTO-on-exit still requires Support approval and typically a 90-day move window. Exit cost is re-platform time (~$113k in our model), not the ~$4,400 egress line.

July 2026: Barclays ~86% plan some repatriation; IDC ~8–9% full exit — both true. Per-workload placement beats multi-cloud-by-default. Scored matrix + daily tax of “just in case” portability.

July 2026: nine migration mistakes that still show up after Migration Hub closed to new customers on November 7, 2025 — AWS Transform MGN (formerly AWS Application Migration Service), DMS, AWS Transform, Org/SCPs, FinOps dual-run costs, and Migration Lens.