After you complete the discovery and assessment phase, and set up yourfoundation design, you can start planning your migration by categorizingyour workloads intomigration waves.

This page describes how to plan a successful migration.

Before you begin

Before you start your migration planning, complete aworkload discovery and assessment,and create an overall migration strategy with the following tasks:

• Create a catalog of workloads, such as applications, services,and databases, that you want to migrate.
• Map the workloads to infrastructure components.
• Map the dependencies.
• Identify high level migration and modernization paths (rehost,replatform, refactor, re-architect, replace, retire).

Then, use theCloud Foundation Toolkit to build your foundation on Google Cloud.

The Cloud Foundation Toolkit includes resources to help you get started with thefollowing aspects of your new cloud infrastructure:

• Identity and Access Management
• Resource management
• Networking
• Data management
• Infrastructure as code
• Logging, monitoring, and billing
• Security foundations
• GKE foundations

Note:Foundations design and set upis a preliminary step to migration planning and landing zone creation.You must tailor your migration landing zones to meet your specificuse cases and application requirements.The details of the landing zone, such as IAM, networkingconstructs, logging, monitoring, billing, and security, are determined basedon the fundamental design elements created during the foundations designphase.

Migration concepts

Acloud migration project represents the entire process thatyour organization follows to migrate the applications to Google Cloud.

Each cloud migration project is divided intowaves. A wave is a group ofapplications that share common characteristics or interdependencies, asidentified by the workload discovery and assessment. Standalone applications anddatabases are typically good candidates for a first migration wave, given theirlow external dependencies. On the other hand, applications with manydependencies would constitute a complex migration wave that requiresadditional planning.

Applications within a migration wave are divided intomove groups andmigrated to Google Cloud insprints.A move group is a group of infrastructure resources and workloads thatyou need to migrate together.These resources and workloads can be part of the same application, or a groupof applications that are interdependent.

Business capability is one of the most important aspects to determine the movegroups. For example, supply chain management and inventory management inretail, fraud monitoring in banking, claim processing in insurance, representbusiness capability areas in the respective domains.Considering business capability is critical to ensure minimal or nodisruption to business service performance and availability duringand after migration.

Within a business capability area, you need to perform the migrationaccording to your different environments.Research and development (R&D) environments are typically the first to bemigrated. This helps you identify and mitigate any blockers that mightprevent or slow down the migration.You can then follow the best practices and mitigation activitiesas you progress through the migration of R&D, pre-productionand production environments.

You need to rundiscovery and assessment as an ongoing process, with datacollection getting increasingly refined and more accurate over time.This lets you constantly improve the accuracy of workload-specific data,which helps you identify workload-specific risks associated with thecloud migration.

The first wave of discovery and assessment lets you create a high-level mapof the dependencies between your infrastructure components and workloads.This helps you plan and optimize the elements of your target Google Cloudarchitecture during the first wave—for example, VM types, storage classes,landing zone design, high-level capacity sizing based on computationaland I/O throughput requirements.

You also need to run amigration risk assessment in parallel withdiscovery and assessment. The aim is to identify and measure theworkload-specific risks associated with the migration, and tostart the appropriate mitigation actions.

The following diagram shows the whole migration process at a glance.

What's next

• Learn how toevaluate and mitigate the migration risks.
• Learn how toplan your migration waves.