Cloud migration sounds straightforward on paper. Take your servers, move them to someone else's servers, save money. In practice, a lift-and-shift is the most expensive way to do it wrong. You end up paying cloud prices for on-premise architecture, with none of the benefits that make cloud worth the move.
The real opportunity in cloud migration is rethinking how your systems communicate, scale, and fail. A well-designed cloud architecture handles failure gracefully because failure is expected. Servers go down. Networks partition. Disks fill up. The question isn't whether these things will happen, but whether your system recovers automatically when they do.
Design for failure
The most reliable systems we've built assume everything will break. Circuit breakers, retry logic, graceful degradation. The user should never see an error page because a downstream service had a bad day. This kind of resilience isn't free, but it's far cheaper than the alternative: 3 AM phone calls and lost revenue.
