Cloud Migration & DevOps: Best Practices for Enterprises

Phased, Risk‑Aware Migration

• Start with non-critical workloads (e.g., dev/test, non-customer facing apps) to reduce risk.
• Use a “lift-and-shift” approach first when possible; later, refactor applications to take full advantage of cloud-native architecture.
• Maintain fallback or rollback plans — ensure backups, disaster recovery, and monitoring are in place before migration.

Automate Deployments & Infrastructure Management

• Implement CI/CD pipelines to automate build, test, and deployment — reducing human error and accelerating release cycles.
• Use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) for reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure.
• Automate monitoring, logging, and alerting so teams can detect issues early.

Adopt Microservices / Modular Architecture (when appropriate)

• Where feasible, refactor monoliths into microservices to allow independent scaling, deployment, and maintenance.
• The combination of microservices + DevOps has been shown to reduce delivery time and burden on teams. arXiv
• However — recognize that microservices also increase architectural complexity; careful design, documentation, and orchestration are critical.

Monitor Costs & Optimize Consumption

• Use cloud-native cost monitoring tools to track usage and spend.
• Take advantage of elastic scaling to match demand and avoid over-provisioning.
• Regularly review unused resources (idle VMs, unattached storage, etc.) for cleanup.