Cloud Migrations & Cross-Border Connectivity

01 Kinds of migration

Provider to provider

AWS to Alibaba Cloud, Azure to AWS, or the consolidation of an estate that accumulated three providers because three teams each picked one.

Region to region

Usually for latency, residency or cost. Frequently underestimated, because the data is the hard part and nobody enjoys the cutover window.

Datacentre to cloud

The classic engagement, still happening, still mostly a question of what to leave behind rather than what to move.

Across the border

Establishing a mainland presence connected to your global estate — CEN, Express Connect, leased lines, VPC peering, with the compliance work attached rather than deferred.

E — THE NEW ONE

Vendor API to your own hardware

Moving inference off a metered third-party API and onto GPUs you control, without a rewrite. The fastest-growing category, and the one this site is mostly about.

How that works

Away from us

If you want to bring operations in-house, we will help you do it properly rather than making it difficult. It happens, and it should be possible.

02 How we do them

Inventory

What actually exists, what it talks to, what is load-bearing and what has been dead for two years but nobody dares delete. This stage produces the surprises, and it is better to have them now.

Decide

What moves, what gets rebuilt, what gets retired. A migration is the cheapest opportunity you will get to delete things, and most estates need it.

Build the target

Landing zone first — accounts, identity, network, budgets — as Terraform in your repository. Nothing moves onto a foundation that was not designed.

Move in slices

Lowest-risk workloads first, with a rollback that has been tested rather than described. Big-bang cutovers are how migrations end up in post-mortems.

Data last

Replication, verification, then a short cutover window. This is always the part that determines the timeline, and pretending otherwise is how dates slip.

Then operate

Optionally we keep running it. Optionally you do. Either way you hold the code and the runbook.