Migration isn't one decision, it's hundreds
"We're moving to the cloud" is the start of a conversation, not a plan. A real estate of 200 applications doesn't have one migration strategy, it has up to 200, because the right move for a legacy mainframe app is nothing like the right move for a stateless web service or a database you could replace with a managed offering tomorrow. The teams that fail treat migration as one big lift-and-shift; the teams that succeed sort each workload into the strategy that fits it.
The 6 Rs are the industry-standard framework for that sorting. Each R is a different answer to "what do we do with this specific application?", trading migration effort against the payoff you get on the other side. This article defines all six, lays them out by effort vs payoff, and gives you a way to assign the right R to each workload.
Note: Who this is for: Engineers and architects planning or executing a cloud migration, or studying the framework for an interview or certification. No prior migration experience needed, but knowing the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS distinction will make the trade-offs land harder.
The 6 Rs, defined
