Related to this question: "Which migration strategy generally has the least cost for an enterprise?" . Your correct answer is "Retire" . I will challenge your answer 🙂 . Because , in my mind, retiring a service doesn’t involve any migration effort or cost, it involves a retiring cost. In my mind as well , the correct answer is Re-Host , because it actually involves a migration cost . It is the least cost because the focus of the migration is done only lifting and shifting the resources – no reshape, no re-architect effort is spent.
1 Answers
Hi Christian,
I love it when we can have a debate on a question like this! I think it is a fair point to say that the disposal costs of retiring an asset might be more than re-hosting costs–as you say lift and shift. If I think of migrating Docker containers to ECS for example…that’s a pretty low cost path.
But, my counter argument is that from a holistic cost standpoint, you still would incur any retirement costs once you decide to rehost the applications…the old assets do not evaporate unless they are already hosted on some other cloud provider. Additionally, your sunk costs are still present and may or may not be completely amortized depending on how your company does accounting.
At any rate, I think you successfully achieved the lesson out of this chapter…costs are very situational! Well done!
–Scott