Your First Migration: The Pioneer Project Strategy
Don't migrate everything. Pick a pioneer workload: stateless, containerized, low-risk, representative. Learn what works, build team capability, prove the model. Here's how to choose your first migration and execute it successfully.
By Jurg van Vliet
Published Sep 10, 2025
Why Not "Lift and Shift Everything"?
I've seen too many ambitious cloud migration plans: "We'll move all 47 applications to European infrastructure in Q2." By Q3, they're still on slide 12 of the migration plan, and leadership is losing patience.
Wholesale migration is the wrong approach. Instead, pick one workload. Get it right. Learn. Iterate.
Criteria for Your Pioneer Project
The ideal first migration has four characteristics:
1. Stateless (or externalized state) A stateless API, a web frontend, or a background worker. If the workload stores data locally, it's harder. If it uses an external database or object storage, that's fine—you're not migrating the data layer yet.
Why this matters: Stateless workloads are disposable. If something goes wrong, you can switch back instantly. You're testing the deployment process without the complexity of data migration.
2. Already containerized If it runs in Docker or on Kubernetes today, it can run on any Kubernetes. If it's not containerized, containerize it first—that's a separate project with its own learning curve.
Why this matters: Containerization is provider-neutral. Once you're in a container, the underlying platform becomes largely irrelevant. This is the portability layer.
3. Low business risk Development environments, internal tools, or non-customer-facing services are ideal. If something goes wrong—deployment fails, latency increases, service goes down—the blast radius is contained.
Why this matters: You're learning. Learning involves mistakes. Make those mistakes where they won't affect customers or revenue.
4. Representative complexity Don't pick a "hello world" static page. Pick something that exercises your actual infrastructure: multiple services, database connections, external integrations, monitoring.
Why this matters: A trivial workload won't reveal real challenges. You need enough complexity to test your processes, find hidden dependencies, and build realistic confidence.
Good First Migrations
Examples I've seen work well:
Internal admin panel: Used by your team, not customers. Connects to the same database your production apps use. Exercises authentication, API access, and deployment workflows. Low risk, representative complexity.
Development/staging environment: Already separate from production. Acceptable downtime. Same stack as production, so you're testing the full workflow. Ideal learning ground.
Background job processor: Pulls work from a queue, processes it, writes results. Stateless, retriable work. Can run in parallel with existing workers during transition.
Documentation or marketing site: Low traffic, static or nearly static, but uses your real deployment pipelines. Good for testing CI/CD integration.
Bad First Migrations
Your billing system: State-heavy, zero-downtime requirement, catastrophic if wrong. Save this for after you've proven the pattern.
Legacy application with undocumented dependencies: "We think it only talks to the database, but we're not sure." Figure out the dependencies first.
Anything with compliance unknowns: If you don't know whether the workload has GDPR, PCI, or regulatory requirements, research that before starting.
Your highest-traffic service: You want to learn on something forgiving, not something where 0.1% error rate means angry customers.
What You Learn from the Pioneer
A successful first migration teaches you:
Your actual portability: Where are the hidden cloud provider dependencies? AWS-specific SDKs, proprietary services, hard-coded regions—these reveal themselves during migration.
Team capability: Who on the team can manage Kubernetes? Who understands networking? Where are the knowledge gaps that need filling?
Deployment patterns: Does your CI/CD work with a new provider? Are credentials managed properly? Does the deployment automation work or is it tied to specific environments?
Operational readiness: Can you monitor, debug, and respond to incidents in the new environment? Is observability set up correctly?
Cost reality: What does this actually cost to run? Are the estimates accurate? Where are the unexpected charges?
After Success: The 20% Experiment
Once your pioneer project is stable, you have proof. You've demonstrated:
- The provider works for your workloads
- Your team can operate the infrastructure
- Costs are acceptable
- Performance meets requirements
Now you can make a realistic decision about the next 20%. Not everything needs to move—maybe only certain workloads benefit from European infrastructure. But you're making that decision from experience, not speculation.
The pioneer project isn't about migrating everything. It's about building capability and proving viability. Do it well, and the rest becomes tractable.
#migration #kubernetes #cloudstrategy #incrementalapproach #learningbyexecuting