After the decision to move to the cloud is made and the frameworks and guardrails are in place and some initial success achieved, almost always, the big question will come down to migration of large amounts of workloads. A cloud migration is defined as the movement of applications, data, or other components from their existing location (usually on-premises) to the cloud. A greenfield development project is one in which there are no legacy constraints imposed on the design and, therefore, a completely new implementation is the outcome. Migrations and greenfield development often exist side by side, where legacy workloads are being migrated into the target cloud operating environment and all new projects are designed as cloud native.

This section will break down common migration patterns, tools that are used in migrations, and how greenfield cloud native development fits into the migration story. This book is not designed to go into the details of cloud migrations. However, migrations are an important part of the cloud native architecture process and it is therefore important to know where the intersections are.