Navigating Cloud Transformation: The Genesis of the 7 Rs Migration Framework
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud computing to unlock unprecedented scalability, agility, and innovation. Yet, transitioning from traditional on-premises infrastructures to cloud environments is a multifaceted endeavor, fraught with complexity and nuanced decisions. At the core of this transformation lies a strategic compass known as the “7 Rs” of migration—a systematic approach that offers organizations a comprehensive framework for navigating their cloud journey effectively.
This methodical schema transcends mere technical execution; it embodies a philosophical reimagining of application lifecycle management in the cloud era. The 7 Rs encapsulate seven distinct pathways organizations can traverse to reallocate their IT assets to cloud platforms, each with unique implications on cost, performance, and operational continuity.
Understanding these strategic modalities is essential for any enterprise poised to harness cloud advantages without succumbing to avoidable pitfalls. In this article, we delve into the foundational Rs—Rehost, Replatform, and Repurchase—and elucidate their nuanced applications in the contemporary AWS migration landscape.
Rehost: The Pragmatic Lift and Shift Paradigm
Often regarded as the most straightforward approach, rehosting epitomizes the “lift and shift” philosophy. It involves migrating applications and workloads to the cloud environment with minimal or no modifications. This strategy leverages virtualization technologies and automated tools to replicate existing on-premises configurations within AWS infrastructures.
The allure of rehosting lies in its expediency and predictability. It enables organizations to rapidly vacate legacy data centers, achieve immediate cost reductions, and capitalize on cloud infrastructure’s elastic capabilities. However, this method may inadvertently perpetuate on-premises inefficiencies if legacy architectural constraints remain unaddressed.
From a nuanced vantage, rehosting serves as a tactical stepping stone, allowing enterprises to establish a foothold in the cloud while deferring more intensive application modernization to subsequent phases. This phased approach mitigates disruption risks and aligns with agile business cycles.
Replatform: Optimizing Without Overhauling
The second migration vector, replatforming, represents a middle ground between wholesale rehosting and comprehensive refactoring. Here, organizations make selective adjustments to optimize applications for cloud environments, enhancing operational efficiency and scalability without fundamentally altering the core architecture.
For instance, migrating databases to Amazon’s managed relational database service (RDS) exemplifies replatforming. This shift offloads administrative burdens such as patching, backups, and scaling, allowing development teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.
Replatforming embodies a principle of evolutionary adaptation—incrementally improving application performance and cost-efficiency while minimizing the risks and resource commitments associated with complete redesigns. It leverages cloud-native capabilities pragmatically, thus harmonizing legacy workloads with the cloud’s dynamic milieu.
Repurchase: Embracing SaaS to Reimagine Enterprise Functions
In some cases, the optimal migration strategy transcends the mere relocation of existing applications. Repurchasing denotes replacing on-premises software with cloud-native Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, effectively outsourcing infrastructure and application management to third-party providers.
This strategy aligns with a broader industry shift towards subscription-based, service-oriented models that prioritize flexibility and user-centricity. By adopting SaaS alternatives—such as switching from a self-managed VPN to a commercial cloud VPN service—organizations unlock rapid deployment cycles, continuous feature upgrades, and predictable expenditure.
Yet, repurchasing necessitates a critical appraisal of business requirements, data governance, and vendor lock-in implications. It challenges organizations to reconcile operational sovereignty with the convenience of managed cloud services, thereby invoking deeper strategic deliberations about digital sovereignty and long-term agility.
The Subtle Interplay Between Strategies and Business Imperatives
These initial three Rs underscore the diversity of pathways available for cloud migration, each reflecting different risk profiles, cost considerations, and timelines. The judicious selection of a migration approach must, therefore, transcend technical criteria to incorporate organizational culture, regulatory mandates, and competitive pressures.
Moreover, the 7 Rs framework invites enterprises to envision cloud migration not merely as a tactical relocation but as an opportunity to reconceptualize IT as a catalyst for innovation and differentiation. This philosophical shift is pivotal in unlocking the cloud’s transformative potential, enabling businesses to evolve from legacy-bound operations to future-ready ecosystems.
A Prelude to a Deeper Exploration
The 7 Rs migration framework encapsulates a holistic paradigm that addresses the intricate spectrum of cloud migration challenges and opportunities. The first triad—Rehost, Replatform, and Repurchase—lays the groundwork for immediate, intermediate, and strategic cloud engagements, respectively.
In subsequent parts of this series, we will explore the remaining four Rs—Refactor, Relocate, Retain, and Retire—unpacking their distinct roles in crafting resilient, agile, and cost-effective cloud architectures.
By embracing this structured approach, organizations can navigate the labyrinthine cloud migration journey with clarity, confidence, and conviction, ensuring their digital transformation endeavors yield enduring value.
Refactoring and Relocating: Advancing the Cloud Migration Maturity Curve
As enterprises progress through their cloud migration journeys, the challenges grow increasingly complex, demanding more nuanced strategies beyond initial lifts and platform tweaks. The next crucial steps in the AWS migration odyssey are Refactoring and Relocating—two paradigms that represent an evolutionary leap in cloud adoption maturity, emphasizing adaptability, performance, and operational finesse.
This article delves into these two pivotal migration strategies, unpacking their essence, benefits, and when they are most judiciously employed. These approaches transcend mere cost-saving maneuvers; they encapsulate a philosophical recalibration of IT assets to harness cloud-native capabilities fully. Understanding their nuances is critical for organizations aiming to maximize cloud value while managing risk and resource expenditure effectively.
Refactoring: The Art of Cloud-Native Reimagination
Refactoring, sometimes interchangeably called re-architecting, embodies the deepest level of application transformation within the 7 Rs framework. It involves redesigning or rewriting an application to exploit the full suite of cloud-native services, architectures, and paradigms.
Unlike rehosting or replatforming, which maintain much of the legacy structure, refactoring often demands substantial code changes, decoupling monolithic applications into microservices, embracing serverless computing, or integrating container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or AWS ECS. This approach unlocks significant advantages, such as enhanced scalability, fault tolerance, improved deployment velocity, and cost optimization through precise resource allocation.
However, the refactoring journey is resource-intensive and fraught with complexity. It requires profound collaboration between developers, architects, and business stakeholders to ensure that the redesigned application aligns with evolving business goals and compliance mandates. Yet, the long-term dividends often justify the upfront investment.
Refactoring also fosters innovation by enabling continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, which accelerate feature delivery and operational agility. It transforms IT from a static cost center into a dynamic enabler of business differentiation.
Strategic Motivations for Refactoring
Organizations opt for refactoring primarily when legacy applications inhibit scalability, resilience, or integration with new cloud services. Applications burdened by technical debt or built on outdated frameworks particularly benefit from this strategy.
Additionally, industries with stringent compliance and security requirements might prefer refactoring to embed robust governance controls and data protection mechanisms inherent to cloud-native environments.
By refactoring, businesses position themselves not only to capitalize on cloud efficiencies but also to future-proof their digital assets against rapidly evolving technological landscapes.
Relocating: The Subtle Shift of Workload Repositioning
Relocating, sometimes less discussed but increasingly vital, involves moving workloads to the cloud without the traditional burdens of refactoring or replatforming. It leverages technologies like VMware Cloud on AWS or AWS Outposts, which enable organizations to extend their on-premises environments seamlessly into the cloud.
This strategy is particularly valuable for organizations prioritizing operational continuity and investment protection. Instead of rewriting applications or reconfiguring infrastructure, relocating shifts the existing environment wholesale into the cloud, preserving familiar operational paradigms.
Relocating is not merely a tactical maneuver; it reflects a hybrid cloud philosophy, embracing both on-premises and cloud resources in a cohesive architecture. This approach addresses scenarios where latency, data sovereignty, or specialized hardware requirements preclude full cloud-native refactoring.
Furthermore, relocating facilitates a gradual migration trajectory, allowing IT teams to gain cloud experience and optimize workloads incrementally. It mitigates the risks of disruption inherent in large-scale transformations and preserves mission-critical applications’ stability.
When to Choose Relocating Over Other Strategies
Relocation is ideal when enterprises require rapid cloud adoption without overhauling their existing environments. Industries with legacy applications tied to specific hardware or regulatory environments often find relocating to be a pragmatic choice.
This strategy also supports disaster recovery and business continuity plans by enabling resilient failover environments within the cloud, without the complexity of application redesign.
Moreover, relocating aids organizations in managing hybrid cloud deployments, fostering seamless integration between private data centers and public cloud services. It supports a continuum of operational models, from full cloud reliance to blended infrastructure ecosystems.
Deeper Reflections on the Cloud Migration Spectrum
Refactoring and relocating represent two poles on a spectrum of migration sophistication. Refactoring demands a paradigm shift in how organizations perceive their applications—not as static entities but as fluid, modular services responsive to market demands.
Relocating, conversely, honors operational inertia and existing investments, providing a bridge between legacy and modernity. Both strategies underscore the importance of contextual decision-making, where technology choices align with business imperatives, risk tolerance, and future aspirations.
This spectrum invites organizations to adopt a portfolio approach—employing different Rs for different applications based on strategic fit and resource availability. Such bespoke migration portfolios optimize cloud adoption success and value realization.
Tools Empowering Refactoring and Relocating
AWS equips organizations with a rich ecosystem of tools to support these strategies. For refactoring, AWS Lambda enables serverless functions that reduce infrastructure management overhead. Amazon ECS and EKS facilitate container orchestration, promoting microservices architectures.
In relocating scenarios, VMware Cloud on AWS provides a seamless hybrid cloud extension, while AWS Outposts delivers consistent infrastructure and services on-premises, tightly integrated with the AWS cloud.
Complementing these are migration accelerators like AWS Migration Hub, which offers centralized tracking of migration progress, and AWS Application Migration Service, facilitating lift-and-shift migrations with minimal downtime.
Such tools reduce the friction of migration, democratizing cloud adoption and empowering organizations to tailor their journeys to their unique constraints and ambitions.
Addressing Challenges and Risk Mitigation
While powerful, refactoring and relocating entail challenges. Refactoring can introduce extended project timelines, elevated costs, and skill gaps. Ensuring adequate training, engaging experienced cloud architects, and incremental rollout strategies mitigate these risks.
Relocating, meanwhile, requires robust network design to avoid latency issues and thorough testing to validate workload compatibility. Clear governance and monitoring frameworks ensure security and compliance across hybrid environments.
Organizations should adopt agile methodologies, emphasize continuous feedback loops, and foster a culture of innovation and resilience to navigate these complexities successfully.
Elevating Cloud Strategy Through Informed Choices
Refactoring and relocating constitute advanced strategies that unlock deeper cloud-native potential and operational flexibility. They require deliberate planning, stakeholder alignment, and technological acumen to execute effectively.
By discerning when to refactor for innovation and when to relocate for continuity, enterprises position themselves to thrive in the dynamic cloud ecosystem. These strategies are not merely migration tactics but integral components of a holistic digital transformation roadmap.
The journey through the 7 Rs migration framework continues, inviting organizations to embrace retention and retirement decisions next. These choices complement migration efforts by optimizing the application portfolio, ensuring focus remains on high-value assets aligned with strategic objectives.
Retain and Retire: Curating the Cloud Migration Portfolio with Precision
As organizations ascend the AWS migration trajectory, a vital realization dawns: not every application merits migration. Some systems are too costly, obsolete, redundant, or critical to operations in ways that cloud transition cannot yet enhance. This is where Retain and Retire strategies emerge—not as sidelined decisions but as thoughtful acts of curation, cost-efficiency, and portfolio refinement.
This article explores these two often-underestimated yet strategic Rs in the AWS migration framework. Unlike the more aggressive tactics of refactoring or rehosting, Retain and Retire are introspective. They demand technical clarity, business foresight, and a commitment to rationalize cloud transformation.
The Philosophy of Retaining: Holding Back with Purpose
Retaining certain applications during a cloud migration is not an act of hesitation—it is an intentional decision rooted in logic. Applications may be retained on-premises for multiple valid reasons: regulatory requirements, latency dependencies, security sensitivities, or sheer complexity that outweighs potential cloud benefits.
For instance, legacy systems tethered to proprietary hardware or industrial control systems may be incompatible with virtualized environments. Similarly, financial institutions governed by stringent regional data residency laws may find it prudent to retain workloads in private data centers.
This retention, however, is not indefinite. It serves as a temporal hold, a conscious decision to defer migration until conditions align technologically or commercially. Retaining, thus, becomes a dynamic checkpoint in the migration lifecycle rather than a static endpoint.
When Retention Makes Strategic Sense
There are specific triggers where retaining an application makes more strategic sense than migrating it. These include:
- Applications nearing end-of-life but still essential for short-term operations
- Systems undergoing major upgrades or vendor transitions
- Workloads with low volatility and minimal performance demands
- Core systems running in regulated environments where compliance hurdles are prohibitive
In these cases, the goal is not to stall modernization but to stage it, allowing enterprises to prioritize transformative projects while keeping critical operations stable.
Crafting a Retention Roadmap
A well-executed retention plan involves more than just marking certain applications as “do not migrate.” It includes robust documentation, performance monitoring, security auditing, and a scheduled reassessment cadence.
Organizations should integrate retained applications with cloud-monitoring tools where possible to ensure visibility across hybrid environments. Utilizing AWS Direct Connect or Site-to-Site VPNs can help bridge network gaps between cloud and on-premises systems, maintaining seamless interoperability.
Moreover, an honest evaluation of the application’s future should be ongoing. What may be retained today might evolve into a replatform or refactor candidate tomorrow, driven by innovation or necessity.
Retiring: The Art of Letting Go with Clarity
Among the 7 Rs, Retiring might seem the most straightforward—sunsetting applications that no longer serve business value. Yet, this strategy demands rigorous analysis, courage, and sometimes difficult decisions. Letting go of legacy systems, even obsolete ones, can cause organizational anxiety, especially when institutional memory is involved.
However, retirement offers a unique opportunity to shed digital ballast. Every data center hosts dormant workloads, forgotten scripts, and archaic applications consuming resources. Retiring such systems is a financial, operational, and environmental imperative.
Application rationalization exercises often uncover redundancies—two or more applications doing the same job, outdated reporting tools, or batch processes whose outputs are no longer used. Identifying and eliminating these systems streamlines the IT portfolio and improves overall security posture.
Key Indicators That an Application Should Be Retired
Several indicators help determine whether an application is a candidate for retirement:
- Usage data shows prolonged inactivity or low engagement
- It has not been updated or supported by the vendor for years..
- Internal stakeholders confirm the system is no longer required.
- It poses more security risk than operational benefit.
- Migration cost far exceeds the value it delivers
Each of these flags should prompt a detailed review, involving both technical teams and business owners to ensure alignment and avoid premature elimination.
Retirement Requires Strategy, Not Just Decommissioning
Retirement is not merely about switching off a server. It includes archiving critical data, ensuring compliance with retention policies, notifying dependent systems or users, and updating documentation.
Cloud migration is an opportunity to clean house, but such tidying must be meticulous. Archival tools like AWS Glacier and AWS Backup can ensure that even retired workloads remain accessible for compliance or forensic purposes.
Moreover, retiring an application may require building lightweight replacement functionality into other systems. For example, if an old reporting system is retired, its core analytics features might be incorporated into a modern BI platform or a cloud-native data lake.
The Psychological Barriers to Retirement
Letting go of legacy systems is not purely a technical challenge; it’s an emotional one. IT teams often hesitate due to fear of data loss, reputational risk, or job relevance. These psychological factors can paralyze decision-making and lead to migration fatigue.
Leadership must therefore encourage a culture that embraces continuous evolution. Retiring outdated tools should be seen as a sign of progress, not loss. Celebrating simplification and recognizing teams for responsible decommissioning can shift the organizational mindset toward cloud-era pragmatism.
Cloud Economics: Why Retiring and Retaining Matter
One of the most critical but overlooked benefits of these two strategies is cost containment. In the zeal to migrate everything, organizations sometimes ignore the financial inefficiency of lifting dormant systems into the cloud. Cloud bills swell with underutilized compute, idle storage, and sprawling networks—all avoidable with deliberate retention or retirement.
These strategies also improve cloud ROI by focusing energy and budget on workloads with high transformation value. Instead of paying for infrastructure to host outdated assets, teams can invest in innovation, automation, and user-centric improvements.
By removing dead weight, IT becomes leaner, faster, and more responsive. It echoes the Japanese concept of “kaizen”—continuous improvement through simplification.
Governance and Compliance in the Retain-Retire Decision Matrix
Organizations navigating retention or retirement must remain vigilant about governance and compliance. Retained systems must not become blind spots in the security architecture. Likewise, retired applications must be properly documented, with clear data disposal or archival trails.
AWS Config and AWS Audit Manager can assist in maintaining compliance visibility, even for systems that remain on-premises or are scheduled for decommissioning. Policy-as-code frameworks can help enforce rules across hybrid infrastructures.
In many ways, governance is the backbone of these decisions. Without it, retained systems become security liabilities and retired ones leave dangerous data footprints.
Embracing Minimalism in Cloud Strategy
Ultimately, retain and retire are exercises in intentionality. They ask not what more can be done, but what less can be carried forward. In a world enamored with scaling and deploying, these strategies encourage thoughtful restraint.
Modern IT leaders are increasingly adopting a minimalist mindset: simplifying tech stacks, reducing tool sprawl, and favoring clarity over complexity. Retaining what matters and retiring what doesn’t is an act of digital curation—ensuring that the cloud environment is not just powerful, but purposeful.
These decisions also enable better focus. By freeing teams from maintaining obsolete systems, organizations reclaim bandwidth to explore AI integrations, improve customer experiences, or enhance cybersecurity.
Strategic Stillness Before the Final Leap
As organizations move deeper into their cloud evolution, Retain and Retire stand as reminders that cloud migration is not just about movement—sometimes it’s about stillness and letting go. These choices balance the transformative impulse with operational wisdom, ensuring that every workload in the cloud truly belongs there.
Next in our journey, we’ll explore the final strategy—Repurchasing—which bridges the gap between innovation and efficiency through SaaS solutions. It’s where enterprises leap into modernity by replacing legacy applications altogether.
The maturity of a migration lies not in how much is moved, but in how well it’s curated. The cloud, after all, is not a place. It’s a philosophy.
Repurchasing: Revolutionizing Cloud Migration Through SaaS Adoption
In the grand symphony of AWS migration strategies, the concept of Repurchasing offers a distinctive cadence. Unlike refactoring or rehosting, which involve modifying or shifting existing workloads, repurchasing invites organizations to rethink their software procurement entirely. This approach is about acquiring entirely new cloud-based solutions—primarily Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings—that replace legacy applications.
Repurchasing embodies a fundamental shift: from owning and maintaining infrastructure and software licenses to subscribing to managed services that deliver scalability, agility, and continuous innovation. This article delves deeply into the nuances of repurchasing as a vital AWS migration strategy, illuminating its advantages, challenges, and the subtle considerations necessary for a successful transition.
Understanding Repurchasing: Beyond Traditional Migration
At its core, repurchasing signifies a pivot from infrastructure-centric IT to service-centric IT. Instead of migrating an existing application to the cloud, businesses replace it with a SaaS solution that is cloud-native, frequently updated, and optimized for modern workloads.
This transition reduces operational overhead—there’s no need for patching, upgrades, or infrastructure management—, llowing enterprises to focus on business outcomes rather than technical upkeep. Examples include replacing an on-premises CRM with Salesforce or a locally hosted ERP system with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
This strategy often leads to faster deployment cycles and access to cutting-edge features that evolve continuously without user intervention.
Why Repurchase? The Compelling Business Imperative
Several drivers fuel the repurchase decision:
- Legacy systems that have become rigid, costly, or incompatible with modern demands
- Need for rapid scalability to accommodate fluctuating workloads or seasonal peaks.
- Desire to leverage AI, analytics, or automation capabilities embedded in SaaS products
- Reduction in capital expenditure by moving to operational expenditure models
- Desire to offload cybersecurity responsibilities to specialized SaaS vendors
By repurchasing, organizations can harness innovation delivered by expert providers who specialize in specific domains, thereby accelerating digital transformation.
Evaluating Repurchase Candidates: When to Say Goodbye and Buy New
Repurchasing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Not all applications are suitable for replacement by SaaS alternatives. Therefore, careful assessment is critical to identify appropriate candidates.
Applications ripe for repurchasing typically exhibit one or more of the following traits:
- Monolithic legacy architecture is resistant to modular upgrades
- High maintenance and support costs that erode business value
- Business processes that align with standardized SaaS workflows
- Poor integration capabilities or technology stack incompatibility with cloud environments
- Software nearing end-of-life or facing vendor obsolescence.
Conversely, highly customized applications with unique business logic or regulatory constraints may require refactoring or rehosting instead.
Planning a Seamless Repurchase Journey
Repurchasing involves more than just selecting a SaaS vendor and flipping a switch. It requires meticulous planning, integration, and change management to avoid disruption and maximize value.
Key steps include:
- Comprehensive gap analysis to identify feature mismatches between legacy systems and SaaS offerings
- Data migration planning, ensuring a secure, accurate, and complete transfer of information
- Integration of SaaS with existing on-premises or cloud systems via APIs or middleware
- Training end-users and stakeholders to adopt new workflows and interfaces
- Establishing governance policies for SaaS usage, data security, and compliance
Organizations must also develop rollback strategies to mitigate risks during the transition phase.
Overcoming the Challenges of Repurchasing
Despite its benefits, repurchasing presents distinct challenges. Vendor lock-in is a significant concern, as shifting to a SaaS platform may limit flexibility or increase switching costs. This necessitates careful contract negotiation and thorough vendor due diligence.
Data security and privacy remain paramount, especially when sensitive information moves outside organizational boundaries. Organizations should demand transparent security certifications, encryption protocols, and incident response commitments from SaaS providers.
Customization limitations may frustrate stakeholders used to bespoke solutions. It’s vital to balance standardization benefits with the necessity for configurable features or complementary custom applications.
Enhancing Cloud Agility with SaaS Ecosystems
Repurchasing opens the door to a broader SaaS ecosystem that can enhance organizational agility. Enterprises can integrate best-of-breed applications across CRM, HR, finance, marketing automation, and more, all managed centrally and accessed globally.
This modular approach aligns with microservices architecture and DevOps practices, allowing incremental adoption of cloud innovations without wholesale rewrites. It also supports rapid experimentation and scalability—a critical advantage in volatile markets.
Moreover, SaaS providers frequently incorporate AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and automation tools, delivering intelligent capabilities that legacy systems cannot match.
Financial Implications: Balancing Opex and Value Creation
The shift to repurchasing transforms IT spending from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx), which offers greater budgeting flexibility but requires diligent cost management.
While SaaS eliminates many infrastructure costs, subscription fees can accumulate, particularly if usage grows unmonitored or shadow IT proliferates. Enterprises should implement usage analytics and budgeting controls to ensure cost-effectiveness.
However, the overall value often justifies the expense—reduced maintenance burdens, accelerated time-to-market, and continuous access to innovations generate returns beyond simple cost savings.
The Role of Cloud-Native Architecture in Repurchasing Success
Adopting SaaS solutions encourages organizations to embrace cloud-native architecture principles: scalability, resiliency, automation, and decoupled services.
This architectural mindset complements repurchasing by enabling seamless integration of SaaS with existing cloud workloads and fostering interoperability between different platforms.
Organizations that cultivate cloud-native skills and tools can maximize the benefits of SaaS adoption, ensuring that repurchasing becomes a springboard for further innovation rather than a siloed deployment.
Repurchasing and Digital Transformation: Catalyzing Organizational Change
Repurchasing is more than a technology shift—it’s a catalyst for cultural and operational transformation. It compels organizations to rethink processes, reskill employees, and embrace a service-oriented mindset.
Successful repurchasing initiatives align closely with business objectives, ensuring that IT investments drive measurable outcomes such as improved customer experiences, faster product launches, or enhanced operational efficiency.
They also encourage cross-functional collaboration between IT, business units, and external vendors, fostering agility and innovation at scale.
Conclusion
This final piece in the AWS migration series completes the exploration of the 7 Rs framework, from Rehost to Repurchase. Each strategy serves a unique role, addressing different technical, operational, and business needs.
By applying these strategies judiciously, enterprises can craft a migration roadmap that is balanced, efficient, and future-proof. The key lies in discerning which workloads to move as-is, which to reimagine, which to retain or retire, and which to replace entirely with SaaS.
This holistic perspective transforms cloud migration from a mere lift-and-shift project into a deliberate, strategic evolution—one that aligns technology with business vision and unleashes the full potential of the AWS cloud.
