Which migration strategy involves moving workloads to the cloud with minimal or no changes?

• A. Lift-and-shift (rehost) involves moving workloads to the cloud with minimal or no changes.
• B. Refactor to cloud-native components.
• C. Rearchitect to microservices.
• D. Replace with SaaS.

Answer: (A)

Moving workloads to the cloud with minimal or no changes is the lift-and-shift approach, also called rehosting. This idea is to take the existing application and its dependencies as-is and relocate them into the cloud environment, typically by moving virtual machines or containers without rewriting code or redesigning the architecture. The advantage is speed and lower upfront risk, since you’re not changing how the application runs. It’s a practical first step when you need rapid cloud access and plan to modernize later, though it often means you don’t immediately gain the benefits of cloud-native features like managed services, auto-scaling, or optimized cost models.

Refactoring to cloud-native components would require modifying the application to take advantage of cloud services, which goes beyond minimal changes. Rearchitecting to microservices involves a substantial redesign of the application into smaller services. Replacing with SaaS means adopting a vendor-provided software solution instead of running the application yourself, which is a different strategy altogether.