DAAI Fellowship

This was a guest lecture rather than a workshop — delivered into the DAAI Fellowship's first cohort with CloudMandap, on what moving an established organisation onto the cloud actually involves.

Enterprise migration is mostly not a technical problem. The services that will host a workload are rarely the hard part; the hard part is the order things move in, what depends on what, which systems cannot be taken offline, how data gets across without a gap in service, and what the organisation does during the period when both the old and new estates are running. The strategy chosen — rehosting as-is, re-platforming, or rewriting — decides the cost and the risk long before any infrastructure is provisioned.

It is a useful subject for a fellowship audience precisely because it is not taught. Students meet cloud architecture as though systems are built new, when most professional cloud work is done on estates that already exist and cannot stop running while they change.