Ever since the advent of the cloud, hyperscalers have been trying to get enterprises to migrate out of their datacenters and into the cloud. There have been many strategies to make this happen but the most common one is often called “Lift and Shift”.

In short, this migration strategy is one where an organization will take their current workloads and move them to the cloud, usually as-is. The idea behind this is to get people on the cloud and then have them modify and optimize their deployments in time. From a business standpoint, this makes sense. Get them on the cloud and spending as soon as humanly possible.

That being said, it’s not a great strategy. Oh sure, it may have been a great strategy in the early days of the cloud. The cloud only offered VMs and many organizations were already using VMs due to VMWare. However, the cloud has evolved beyond simple VMs. It’s time that we call bullshift.

What’s Wrong with Lift and Shift?

So why am I calling bullshift? As mentioned earlier, this strategy often came from cloud providers and cloud ISVs. People wanted to move businesses to the cloud as fast as possible and this was the simplest way to do it. However, VMs are not the best compute unit for Cloud Computing.

Let’s say I am a baker at a bakery.

VMs are not super portable. They are “heavier” and take time to startup.

Cloud Native > https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/main/DEFINITION.md

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