Migration & Modernization

Move workloads to AWS — and modernize them along the way.

12 sessions at the summit4 external resources

Overview

AWS Migration Hub orchestrates large migrations. AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) lift-and-shifts servers; AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) handles databases. AWS Transform is the new agentic AI service for VMware migrations and .NET / mainframe modernization. The 7 R's framework — Retire, Retain, Relocate, Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor — guides each application's strategy.

Key concepts

  1. The 7 R's migration strategies
  2. Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) funding and methodology
  3. Application discovery and dependency mapping
  4. Database migration patterns: homogeneous vs. heterogeneous
  5. Mainframe and VMware modernization with agentic AI

Key AWS services

  • AWS Migration Hub
  • AWS Application Migration Service
  • AWS Database Migration Service
  • AWS Transform
  • AWS Schema Conversion Tool

Learn more — curated resources

Hand-picked official docs, foundational papers, and the best community guides for going deeper on this topic.

Sessions on this topic

12 sessions from the Summit covered this topic. Each is a self-contained mini-lesson.

  1. MAM302Advanced

    Agentic AI for VMware migrations with AWS Transform for VMware

    Accelerate your VMware migration journey with AWS Transform, the first agentic AI service for large-scale VMware workload migrations to Amazon EC2. Discover how to migrate from on-premises VMware infrastructure to a modernized, cloud-native architecture while overcoming challenges like evolving licensing models and vendor lock-in. Meet the team behind AWS Transform and see a live demonstration showcasing automated application discovery, dependency mapping, network translation, wave planning, and server migration with optimized EC2 instance selection. Learn practical approaches to streamline large-scale migrations and modernize VMware workloads to AWS with greater speed and confidence.

  2. MAM301Advanced

    From tech debt to competitive advantage: Migrate & modernize with AWS

    Your legacy applications and infrastructure don't have to be a liability. In this session, discover how leading enterprises are converting tech debt into modern cloud advantages that unlock AI capabilities, cut costs, and accelerate innovation. The path to AI starts with migration and modernization. We'll walk through the complete transformation journey: infrastructure, applications, data, and AI-ready business outcomes. You'll see how new agentic AI automation is making migration and modernization faster, simpler, and more cost-effective. We'll explore proven pathways for your most critical workloads (Microsoft, VMware, SAP, and mainframe), backed by 20 years of AWS expertise.

  3. MAM303Advanced

    Digital transformation excellence using agentic AI

    Discover how customers are leveraging AWS AI-driven solutions to accelerate their cloud transformation journey, moving beyond traditional migration and modernization to achieve digital transformation excellence. This session showcases real-world experiences where organizations have integrated AI-powered accelerators with AWS cloud services to achieve 3x faster migration timelines and drive unprecedented business value. Learn actionable strategies and see demonstrations of how a large transformation project can become a digital enterprise enabler for your organization,

  4. ISV210Intermediate

    Boost performance and reduce costs with Aurora: Canva's story

    From initial idea to executionlearn about Canva's journey migrating MySQL workloads from Amazon RDS to Aurora at scale. Discover how Canva achieved meaningful performance improvements, cost savings, and operational efficiencies through this strategic migration. This lightning talk shares real-world insights on planning and executing large-scale database migrations, key Aurora best practices for optimizing cost and performance, and how the latest monitoring features help maintain efficiency as you scale. Learn how AWS Countdown Premium (CDP) accelerated and de-risked Canva's migration, delivering tangible business value while minimizing operational disruption.

  5. MAM307Advanced

    Modernise legacy code using fine-tuned Gen AI models

    Rio Tintos data science team saw an opportunity to preserve institutional knowledge and improve developer productivity by modernizing a legacy codebase. Rather than attempting a full system overhaul, the team focused first on adding generative AI capabilities to their critical legacy application. By using the proven, open, and trusted data foundation of AWS, the company laid the groundwork for incremental modernization without disrupting core operations. Learn about model fine tuning against legacy codebases, Amazon Nova, SageMaker Jumpstart and AgentCore in this deep dive with AWS & Rio Tinto

  6. TNC202Intermediate

    Accelerate Your Cloud Journey with AWS Transform

    Embark on a faster, smoother cloud transformation with agentic AI and integrated solutions. This session reveals how AWS Transform accelerates your cloud journey, addressing migration and modernization challenges through intelligent automation. Through real-world examples, discover how to leverage this powerful integration to fast-track your cloud adoption and transformation efforts. With the specialized AI agents of AWS Transform, customers can migrate VMware workloads to Amazon EC2, modernize .NET applications to cross-platform .NET, and modernize IBM z/OS mainframe applications, delivering transformation projects up to 4x faster.

  7. ISV205Intermediate

    AWS Graviton: The best price performance for your AWS workloads

    AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances provide the best price performance for workloads in Amazon EC2. In this session, dive deep into the AWS Graviton processor and learn about its workload performance, energy efficiency, and software offerings. Hear from Atlassian as they share their Graviton adoption journey and practical tips for migration success. Learn about common use cases, best practices to optimize your workloads across various applications, customer success stories and how you can accelerate your AWS Graviton journey.

  8. MAM305Advanced

    Legacy App modernization and reverse engineering using Kiro

    This session demonstrates how agentic AI systems revolutionize legacy application modernization through intelligent reverse engineering workflows. We showcase a multi-agent architecture that autonomously analyzes legacy codebases, generates comprehensive business specifications, and rebuilds cloud-native applications while preserving critical business logic. Our agentic framework orchestrates specialized AI agentsAnalyzer, Generator, Evaluator, and Refinerworking collaboratively to extract institutional knowledge from decades-old systems and validate modernized applications against original code. Drawing from real-world enterprise implementations including Commonwealth Bank of Australia's transformation, we present practical patterns for deploying autonomous AI agents that achieve 70% efficiency gains in modernization cycles.

  9. FSI201Intermediate

    BELIEVE: The Impossible Migration That Transformed Australian Banking

    Commonwealth Bank migrated the world's largest SAP core banking deployment to AWS in 18 months: the system behind 40% of Australia's payments, 15 million customers, running 247. This isn't a lift-and-shift story, it's a reinvention of how the bank runs critical systems - from architecture and resilience engineering to replacing siloed operational teams with full-stack automation, and the cultural shift this required. Join us to hear how CBA's critical financial infrastructure was modernised with AWS, and what this unlocks for their AI-enabled future. If you're building foundations for regulated, mission-critical workloads, this is the session you don't want to miss.

  10. WPS204Intermediate

    Safe Transport Victoria's Migration to AWS Cloud

    Join us for an in-depth case study on Safe Transport Victoria's successful use of Cloud to modernise, streamline and save costs while moving from on-premises infrastructure to AWS Cloud. This session will demonstrate how a small Regulator has added resilience to their safety outcomes, including to those Victorians with accessibility and mobility needs achieved modernization while maintaining service continuity and reliability.

  11. DEV310Advanced

    Zero-Downtime Migration from Sydney to Auckland (ap-southeast-6)

    With AWS ap-southeast-6 (Auckland) now open, New Zealand organizations can repatriate workloads from Sydney. This advanced session provides practical migration strategies minimizing downtime and eliminating data loss across every layer of your stack. You'll learn region-to-region migration patterns for: *Storage*: S3 replication, EBS snapshots, EFS cross-region transfers *Databases*: RDS read replicas, DynamoDB global tables, self-managed EC2 database replication *Applications*: Lambda, ECS/EKS workload migration, EC2 AMI copying Walk away with a prioritized migration playbook, realistic RTO/RPO targets, and battle-tested sequencing strategies for large-scale data transfers without extended application outages.

  12. INO102Foundational

    Partnering for Scale & Innovation

    Discover how Sportsbet, Australia's leading sports betting platform, transformed its technology organization through strategic AWS partnerships. Learn how they built an enterprise-wide AI learning culture that achieved record-breaking certification results, and completed a serverless-first modernization that delivered significant cost savings and emissions reductions while handling massive scale. This session shares practical strategies for building executive buy-in, establishing effective AWS partnerships, and creating a culture where innovation thrivesdemonstrating how to focus internal resources on competitive differentiation while partnering for technical expertise to accelerate transformation.

Non-obvious insights

From the Playbook

One sharp, contrarian insight per session — the things teams don't think of unprompted.

Agent-driven migration shines on the *long tail* of small workloads, not the strategic flagship apps. Target tier-3/4 apps first to bank fast wins and build trust. The flagship workloads will need bespoke human attention regardless of tooling. ---MAM302 — Agentic AI for VMware migrations with AWS Transform …
The best migration ROI argument to the board isn't cost savings — it's *capability unlock*. Frame the budget ask accordingly: "we cannot do X, Y, Z on the current stack." Cost-only arguments lose to "wait six months and revisit." Capability arguments don't. ---MAM301 — From tech debt to competitive advantage: Migrate & m…
The biggest barrier to fast migration isn't tech — it's stakeholder approval cycles. AI doesn't help there directly. The transformation programs that move fastest *pre-approve* common patterns in advance, so individual migrations bypass the slow path. That's an org-design move, not a tech move. ---MAM303 — Digital transformation excellence using agentic AI
The most underrated Aurora feature isn't performance — it's *storage decoupling for clones*. You can spin up a full prod-fidelity clone in minutes for testing, with no storage cost duplication. Use clones for staging, load testing, and pre-prod validation. Most teams underuse this. ---ISV210 — Boost performance and reduce costs with Aurora: Canv…
18 months for a SAP core banking migration sounds impossible because it usually *is* impossible — except CBA also redesigned their team structure simultaneously. The migration was an *outcome* of the org change, not the cause of it. Most failed migrations try to lift-and-shift the org alongside the workloads. That doesn't work. ---FSI201 — BELIEVE: The Impossible Migration That Transformed A…
Cloud platforms now provide accessibility primitives (live captioning, screen-reader-friendly APIs, language translation) that on-prem rarely had. The migration unlocks accessibility, not just scale. Frame the business case accordingly when selling to government boards. ---WPS204 — Safe Transport Victoria's Migration to AWS Cloud