Lift and shift
Lift and shift, also called rehosting, is a cloud migration strategy that moves an application from one environment to another with little or no change. Servers become cloud virtual machines of a similar size, and the code and architecture stay the same. It is the fastest way out of a data center, but it carries every existing problem along.
How it works
Teams copy disks or rebuild matching VMs, move the data, and switch traffic over. AWS lists rehost as one of seven migration strategies, along with relocate, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire and retain.
The common trap is sizing. A 16 vCPU server idling at 10% CPU, moved as an m5.4xlarge on demand in us-east-1, costs $0.768 an hour, about $561 a month. Right-sized to an m5.xlarge at $0.192 an hour, it costs about $140. Without that step, the cloud bill can exceed the old hosting cost.
Why it matters in production
Lift and shift buys speed and a smaller migration risk when a deadline, such as a data center lease, is fixed. It does not buy elasticity, managed services or better reliability. Plan a second phase to rightsize and modernize, or treat the move as a rebuild from the start.
See also
On the One2N blog
Further reading
