Companies will start off the journey with the decision to be a cloud-first organization and the creation of a DevOps team, and will then continue with choosing a cloud vendor and setting up the target cloud-operating foundation. Soon after these activities are complete, the time to scale-out and ramp up migrations begins. A cloud native company will have the goal of reducing their self-managed data centers and workloads and shifting those as much as possible to the cloud. There are three main paths this can present:

• Lift-and-shift migration of legacy workloads to the cloud
• Re-engineering of legacy workloads to optimize in the cloud
• Greenfield cloud native development

For most large enterprise companies, all three of these options will take place with different parts of the legacy workloads. For smaller companies, any mix of the three could be employed, depending on the outcomes being sought.