Lift and Shift (Rehosting)
Moving an application to AWS with minimal or no changes to its architecture: the fastest migration approach, and often the most expensive to run long-term.
Definition
Lift and Shift, formally called Rehosting, means moving a workload to AWS as-is: same architecture, same configuration, just running on different infrastructure. It's the fastest route to the cloud and a reasonable first step for time-constrained migrations, but because it doesn't take advantage of managed services or elastic scaling, it frequently costs more to run on AWS than the equivalent on-premises setup did, and is best treated as a starting point rather than a destination.
In Practice
A business under time pressure to exit a data centre lease might rehost first to hit the deadline, then plan a follow-up replatforming phase once the pressure is off, rather than treating the rehosted state as final.