The current-state assessment inventories workloads, data stores, network paths, deployment procedures, recovery evidence and cost drivers. Criticality is assigned by business capability rather than server name. The team models likely failure domains—process, node, zone, site, link and provider—and identifies which ones the target platform must tolerate automatically versus recover from procedurally.
A landing zone establishes identity, network segmentation, secrets, logging, policy and cost allocation before application teams are invited onto the platform. Reusable infrastructure modules create consistent environments while keeping parameters visible. Container orchestration is used when workload diversity, scheduling or release isolation warrants it; simpler managed runtimes remain valid where they reduce operational burden.
Stateful design receives separate treatment. Replication mode follows consistency requirements. Strongly consistent transactions may remain within a locality while read models and asynchronous events travel across regions. Conflict-free or application-mediated reconciliation is used only where concurrent writes are a real requirement. Backup retention and restoration are verified independently of high availability because replication can faithfully reproduce deletion or corruption.