Crawl, Walk, Run

Amazon’s strategy for migrating enterprises to the cloud seems to be: crawl, walk, run. Start with simple things like S3 storage, move on to use AWS for development and test, and then watch how production is moved. This has been well-articulated by James Governor, who wrote,

It makes a great deal of sense to encourage its customers to adopt the pattern. That is—start with test, and go from there. Don’t tell the customer to immediately migrate everything to, and run everything on, the cloud. Which would of course be insane. On the contrary recommend a low barrier to entry approach. Production is an end state where the customer finally just says: “remind me again why we aren’t using this flexible infrastructure as a production environment?”

He goes on to say, “Amazon is the new VMware. The adoption patterns are going to similar. Enterprise will see AWS as a test and development environment first, but over time production workloads will migrate there.” He may well be right.