Migration Strategies (The 7 Rs)
The seven standard approaches to moving a workload to AWS: Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Relocate, Refactor, Retain, and Retire, each trading off speed, cost, and long-term fit differently.
Definition
The 7 Rs is the standard AWS framework for categorising migration approaches: Rehost (lift and shift), Replatform (lift, tinker, and shift), Repurchase (move to a SaaS alternative), Relocate (move infrastructure to AWS without buying new hardware, rewriting applications, or changing operations, such as moving VMware workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS), Refactor (redesign for cloud-native architecture), Retain (leave in place for now), and Retire (decommission entirely). Relocate is the most recent addition to what was previously the 6 Rs. Most real migrations use several of these across a single application portfolio rather than picking one strategy for everything; the right choice depends on each workload's business criticality, technical debt, and how much change the organisation can absorb at once.
In Practice
A portfolio assessment might relocate a VMware estate to VMware Cloud on AWS to exit a data centre quickly, rehost a legacy internal tool with little future investment, replatform a core application's database onto RDS, and retire three systems nobody realised were still running.