AWS Migration Checklist: A Step-by-Step Guide

An AWS migration is the process of moving your applications, data and infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. Done well, it improves scalability, reliability and cost; done without a plan, it causes downtime and surprise bills. This checklist walks through the four phases — assess, plan, migrate and optimise — that keep a migration smooth.

1. Assess your current environment

• ›Inventory applications, dependencies, data volumes and traffic patterns.
• ›Identify what can lift-and-shift vs what should be re-platformed or modernised.
• ›Map compliance, data-residency and security requirements up front.
• ›Set a baseline for current cost and performance so you can prove improvement later.

2. Plan the target architecture

Design the AWS environment against the Well-Architected Framework — security, reliability, performance, cost and operational excellence. Decide your migration strategy per workload (rehost, replatform or refactor), define networking and access, and write the architecture as infrastructure-as-code so it is repeatable and reviewable.

3. Migrate with minimal downtime

• ›Start with a low-risk pilot workload to validate the approach.
• ›Use data-replication and cutover strategies that keep downtime to a minimum.
• ›Automate provisioning with Terraform or CloudFormation rather than manual setup.
• ›Test thoroughly in AWS before cutting over production traffic.

4. Optimise after the move

Migration is the start, not the finish. Once you are running on AWS, right-size resources, add autoscaling, set budgets and alerts, and run a cost review — most environments carry 30–40% avoidable waste that a FinOps pass recovers. Harden security and put monitoring and backups in place.

iMagic Solutions is an AWS-certified solution provider that runs migrations end to end — from assessment to a cost-optimised, well-architected environment — with minimal downtime.