Cloud Migration Checklist: 15 Steps for a Safer Lift‑and‑Shift (2026 Update)

Hook: Move fast, but don’t break production

Cloud migration remains one of the highest-risk engineering initiatives. In 2026, teams must balance speed with observability and security. This updated 15-step checklist combines industry best practices to execute lift-and-shift and phased modernizations safely.

Why update the checklist now?

Edge compute, serverless platforms, and advanced observability tools changed assumptions about latency, cost, and telemetry. Teams need a migration checklist that reflects modern canary practices and the need for zero-downtime telemetry.

The 15-step checklist

1. Inventory assets and map service dependencies.
2. Define business KPIs and SLOs to watch during migration.
3. Create a data migration plan with validation and reconciliation.
4. Design network topologies and identify latency constraints.
5. Prepare IAM and least-privilege roles for new cloud accounts.
6. Plan cache and CDN strategies to avoid stale serving after cutover.
7. Set up telemetry pipelines and tracing for every service boundary.
8. Implement canary releases and feature-flag gating for cutovers.
9. Automate rollback and emergency kill-switches in CI/CD.
10. Audit dependencies and plan for supply-chain validation.
11. Run synthetic traffic tests and peak simulations.
12. Plan for DNS TTLs and phased DNS migrations.
13. Run security and compliance scans pre- and post-cutover.
14. Prepare runbooks and incident response plans for migration windows.
15. Schedule staged launches and post-migration reviews.

Key integrations

Observability matters: integrate zero-downtime telemetry and canary gates so you can abort on regressions. The zero-downtime telemetry playbook provides patterns for gating on business and technical metrics. For cache behavior, consult HTTP caching guidance.

Testing and validation

Don’t assume parity. Run data verification jobs, synthetic traffic shapes, and chaos tests. Also validate authorization paths using up-to-date incident response guidance from authorize.live.

Cutover strategies

• Blue/green with telemetry gates: shift small slices of traffic to the cloud and let telemetry decide.
• Phased DNS: reduce TTLs ahead of time and migrate by user cohorts.
• Gateway-based routing: use gateways to split traffic between origin and cloud during validation.

Post-migration steps

1. Monitor KPIs for an extended validation window.
2. Audit cost and optimize for the new cloud topology.
3. Run a postmortem regardless of outcome and capture lessons learned.

Further reading

The industry canonical checklist is available at Cloud Migration Checklist — beneficial.cloud. Combine that checklist with canary and telemetry patterns from analysts.cloud and caching strategies from caches.link to cover operational traps.

Closing advice

Cloud migration is a program, not a task. Ship small, automate rollbacks, and invest in telemetry before you move traffic. If you do that, you’ll reduce blast radius and deliver value sooner.

Make telemetry and rollback automation your top two priorities during migration.