Cloud Solutions & Migration

• Lift-and-Shift (Rehost): Move workload to EC2 without modification. Fastest migration, maintains existing architecture. Appropriate for legacy apps not worth re-architecting. Tooling: AWS Application Migration Service (MGN).
• Re-platform: Minor optimisations move to managed services like RDS instead of self-managed MySQL on EC2. Most lift-and-shift workloads should be re-platformed. Tooling: AWS DMS for databases.
• Re-architect: Redesign for cloud-native containerise, decouple, adopt managed services. Highest investment, best long-term outcome. Operational overhead significantly reduced. Pattern: Monolith → ECS Fargate microservices.
• Retire: Decommission workloads that are no longer needed. Migration assessment consistently finds 20-30% of workloads that should be retired not migrated.

AWS is the default choice for most B2B companies: largest service catalogue, most mature ecosystem, most available engineers and tooling, most partner integrations (Fivetran, Datadog, Snowflake, Terraform all treat AWS as primary). GCP is better when: your team is heavily invested in Google Workspace, you are building on BigQuery (native, best performance), you need Kubernetes at scale (GKE is most mature managed Kubernetes Google invented Kubernetes), or you require Vertex AI (Google's ML platform with first-party Gemini and AutoML). Azure is better when: your organisation is Microsoft-first (Active Directory, Office 365, Windows-heavy Azure AD integration native), you have existing Enterprise Agreement pricing, or your compliance framework requires Azure Government or sovereign cloud regions. ClickMasters defaults to AWS, builds on GCP for data-heavy GCP-native teams, and builds on Azure for Microsoft-centric enterprise clients.

FinOps (Financial Operations for cloud) brings financial accountability to cloud spending making cloud cost visible, optimisable, and predictable. Cloud costs are variable and controllable in real time, unlike fixed infrastructure costs. FinOps practices that consistently reduce cloud spend: right-sizing (match instance size to actual utilisation AWS Compute Optimiser identifies 20-40% waste), commitment discounts (Reserved Instances and Savings Plans offer 30-60% off on-demand for predictable workloads), schedule-based scaling (shut down non-production environments on nights and weekends 70% cost reduction), Spot Instances for batch processing (60-80% cheaper), and cost allocation tags (attribute every dollar to team, service, or environment accountability drives optimisation). ClickMasters implements these in a FinOps engagement, typically reducing AWS bills by 30-50% within 60 days.