Cost profiles vary widely. Initial migrations often run 20% to 50% over budget due to discovery gaps and testing. Ongoing expenses can decline through rightsizing and reserved instances, but poor management often leads to 25% to 35% waste from idle resources. These lessons underscore the importance of modeling the total cost of ownership up front, including people, training, and change management.
What we’ve learned: Pure lift-and-shift rarely delivers the promised ROI. Organizations that succeed treat migration as an opportunity for modernization rather than a simple move. Phased approaches with strong governance and finops practices minimize overruns, which have historically plagued most efforts.
Cloud-native applications
Teams build microservices, serverless functions, or containerized apps on platforms such as Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, or Azure Functions. This approach leverages elasticity, devops pipelines, and managed services to accelerate time to market.
Risks focus on architectural complexity and skills gaps. Overengineering with too many microservices creates operational nightmares, while underengineering leads to unscalable monoliths. Distributed systems need constant security vigilance. New apps often begin well but gain technical debt when teams prioritize features over observability and resilience. Entry costs are usage-based, which sounds attractive, but they often spike at scale due to poor design.