Writing Amazon's Internal Runbook for the Move to AWS
The internal migration runbook for Amazon's company-wide mandate to move applications off VMs and onto AWS — written before CloudFormation, Lambda, ECS, or most managed services existed, when everything was built from EC2, S3, EBS, and early RDS.
In 2011 there was no abstraction layer to choose between. There was EC2, S3, EBS, and a one-year-old RDS — and an internal mandate that every Amazon team get off the company’s internal virtualization platforms and onto AWS. Someone had to write down how. That turned out to be me.
The full write-up will cover:
- Prescriptive pattern mapping: common application shapes paired with their AWS-primitive implementations
- Re-educating engineers that ephemeral instance storage was actually ephemeral
- AMI hygiene before Packer existed
- Writing documentation that worked for both the migration enthusiasts and the skeptics
- What first-principles cloud architecture taught that the managed-service era made optional
Full case study coming soon.