13. After the Migration: What Success Looks Like

2024-09-01

So you've launched. The workloads are live. Alarms are green. But is the migration actually "done"?

The answer is less about infrastructure and more about outcomes. When AWS migration works, it shows — in velocity, in alignment, and in how boring infrastructure becomes. And when it works really well, people stop talking about the migration altogether. It becomes part of the air: invisible, expected, and no longer debated.

Here are the moments that mark real success — gathered from migrations where the transition stuck, and the teams evolved with it.

Infrastructure becomes predictable and visible — no one is babysitting servers
Deployment becomes routine — fear fades, and velocity rises
Autoscaling actually works — usage drives cost, not guesswork
Expansion to new regions or services is unblocked — the infra isn't the limit
Fewer people operate more systems — effort shifts from maintenance to delivery
Time-to-market improves — developers ship faster, deploy more often

This is what success looks like when it starts to compound: more autonomy, fewer surprises, faster output.

Of course, success isn’t only about technical fluency.

Organizational and Political Maturity

Sometimes you can feel the shift before you see it on charts:

C-level and business units understand the new platform — and support it
Developer morale improves — frustrations with brittle systems are gone
Infra teams are no longer firefighting or blamed — they’re enablers
No more debates about the move itself — it’s the new normal
Power struggles fade — ownership boundaries are accepted and enforced

The best migrations don’t win arguments. They make the arguments obsolete.

Documentation, Training, and Knowledge Transfer

This is often the silent killer of otherwise successful migrations. If the new platform lives in the heads of a few core engineers, the migration isn’t done. It’s just frozen.

These signs matter:

Runbooks are updated — teams respond to incidents using the real system
Docs exist for self-serve actions — developers don't wait on DevOps to scale a DB
Support teams are trained — they know where to look, what’s normal, and when to escalate
Onboarding reflects the new stack — new hires don’t learn the old world
Workshops and retrospectives happen — lessons are shared, not buried
Key knowledge is distributed — not locked in a few migration leads’ heads

The less visible this work is, the more likely your team is truly operating in a new environment.

"The tools we migrated for became tools we build with. That’s when it felt like ours."

It ends when:

Your infra is boring and scalable
Your developers can ship without blockers
Your business can scale without infra constraints
And your team has moved on — to solving real problems, not just replatforming.