Future-Proofing Your Cloud: Why Tech Leaders Choose to Refactor
Cloud migration has become crucial for businesses striving to scale, reduce costs, and maintain agility in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
With global cloud spending projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2025, according to Gartner’s 2025 Cloud Forecast, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud strategies to stay competitive.
However, the choice of migration strategy—ranging from simple lift-and-shift to the more complex refactoring or re-architecting—can significantly impact outcomes.
Refactoring, while time- and cost-intensive, offers unparalleled benefits in certain scenarios, but when is it truly worth the investment?
The Techronicler team engaged tech leaders and experts to address the query:
Cloud migration is a critical move for businesses aiming to scale, cut costs, and stay agile. With different migration strategies to choose from, under what circumstances would you deploy the time- and cost-intensive strategy of refactoring or re-architecting?
Their insights reveal the strategic, technical, and business-driven circumstances where refactoring delivers long-term value, from modernizing legacy systems to enabling AI-driven innovation, ensuring businesses thrive in a cloud-first world.
Read on!
Alex Ramasheuski
It always requires careful, case-by-case analysis, of course. But to put it simply: if you’re dealing with a large legacy monolith, re-architecting is the preferred strategy that sets you up for long-term success.
Only by breaking the system into smaller and more independent parts can you enable the app to scale smoothly and dynamically, fix major performance bottlenecks, reduce operational complexity, and truly take advantage of cloud-native features like auto-scaling, microservices, and managed services.
What’s more, thanks to modern tools – like containers – you can encapsulate legacy components and build new, modern APIs on top. This lets you modernize gradually without needing a full risky rewrite right away.
Refactoring mainly tackles technical debt. It might improve the code but it doesn’t always deliver significant business value from cloud migration, since the system stays complex and tightly connected.
And simple lift-and-shift migrations mostly work for large legacy monoliths only as a temporary or intermediate step to address urgent business needs.
For example, if your company needs to vacate a physical data center quickly because of lease expiration or hardware end-of-life, or if you’re under budget pressure and need to reduce on-premises costs immediately.
Over the long run, lift-and-shift often even leads to higher costs because the app isn’t optimized for cloud usage – for example, it may run on oversized VMs 24/7, or require expensive networking and storage.
Alex Ramasheuski
Head of Enterprise Application Development, ScienceSoft
Garrett Yamasaki
Refactoring or re-architecting becomes critical when legacy systems actively hinder innovation. At Google, we re-architected ad-serving pipelines to leverage auto-scaling serverless functions when latency spikes threatened SLAs. Costly upfront, but slashed runtime costs by 60% long-term.
Similarly, at WeLoveDoodles, refactoring our monolithic inventory API into microservices was non-negotiable once Black Friday traffic caused 12-hour outages. The trigger is when technical debt blocks cloud-native advantages (AI/ML integration, real-time analytics) or scalability. Key signs like frequent downtime, spiraling compute costs, or teams avoiding feature work due to brittle code.
Only pursue a full cloud migration if your business goals demand it (e.g., entering a new market, scaling 10x). For niche e-commerce, we refactored selectively, prioritizing checkout flows over admin panels.
Sergios Sergiou
Refactoring or re-architecting is best deployed when a business seeks to fully leverage cloud-native capabilities such as scalability, resiliency, and agility.
This approach is ideal if the current application architecture is monolithic, outdated, or limits innovation and performance in the cloud.
Organizations aiming for long-term digital transformation, faster release cycles, or integration with modern technologies (like microservices, containers, or serverless computing) often choose this path.
Although it’s time- and cost-intensive, refactoring ensures future-readiness, better cost optimization through resource efficiency, and enhanced user experiences.
It’s particularly useful when the existing system presents performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, or compliance challenges that can be resolved more effectively through a complete architectural overhaul.
Ryan Jensen
Ideally, you would start your migration with a lift and shift, or a replatform/rehost kind of migration (the big 2 of the 6 Rs). In doing so, you get your resources close together to minimize latency, so all of your applications and systems are talking together at the highest efficiency rate.
Once you’ve made that move to the cloud and you’re starting to get established, that’s when you should consider a modernization effort, where you’ll do the refactoring or re-architecting. In doing so, that’s going to help you leverage a lot more of the cloud native features and services (like auto scaling, resiliency, failover, etc.).
You ideally want a cloud native application, which will be more cost-effective, operationally manageable, and resilient by doing the refactoring and re-architecting so that your application fits the services offered by the cloud.
Ryan Jensen
Senior Software Developer, Sketch Development Services
Rob Dillan
Refactoring or re-architecting is usually used when the business decides to cloud-optimize applications as a whole, for scalability, performance, and agility purposes.
This approach is a good fit when you have a legacy system that is dated, inefficient, or does not use cloud-native capabilities, such as autoscaling, microservices, and containers. It’s typically selected when a company needs to update its architecture for future growth, or when certain cloud-based functionalities are needed that a lift-and-shift model simply cannot deliver.
While expensive, it makes up for it if you decrease your technical debt and achieve more efficiency and gains in the long run. Refactoring or re-architecting a legacy system is also a costly option, because it’s time-consuming and costly in terms of effort and investment.
The costs of a basic refactoring project can vary between $20,000 and $100,000, according to Sciencesoft. The more complex your application is, the more expensive the refactoring process.
The most investment-intensive approach to cloud migration is re-architecting, a strategy that Deloitte said is often pursued to enhance agility and scale with the requirements of modern business.
Rob Dillan
Founder, EVhype
Meyr Aviv
At iMoving, we didn’t just migrate to the cloud—we tore it all down and rebuilt from scratch.
Refactoring was costly and time-consuming, but essential. Why? Because duct-taping legacy code to the cloud is like slapping a Tesla logo on a gas engine.
We needed scalability, microservices, and real-time API performance to support our dynamic marketplace.
The “lift-and-shift” shortcut would’ve buckled under our growth.
Refactoring is painful, yes—but if you’re serious about scale, customer experience, and long-term agility, it’s the only strategy that pays dividends instead of tech debt.
Shortcuts don’t scale.
Razvan Cojocariu
Contrary to the growing popular belief, cloud-based architecture is rarely the best solution. It is however the simplest way of creating a scalable solution if you have shortcomings or limited resources in the engineering department.
Monolithic architectures have many benefits, like lower complexity, simpler communication between components, fewer failure points, better developer experience, they’re faster, etc., so the decision to move away from this shouldn’t be done on a whim.
Obviously a cloud architecture has its own set of benefits, but migrating an already existing monolithic architecture to a cloud-based one should only be considered when an overhaul of the whole thing is imminent anyway, such as when the service is facing unsolvable performance issues.
Razvan Cojocariu
Founder, Servervana
Andrew Stevens
Refactoring or re-architecting makes the most sense when you’re aiming for long-term, transformative benefits that simpler migration paths can’t deliver. It’s the right move when your applications need significant changes to take full advantage of cloud-native capabilities, especially for advanced use cases like AI and machine learning.
For example, preparing data pipelines, modernizing how applications interact with AI services, and ensuring your infrastructure can handle real-time, compute-intensive workloads all benefit from a refactored approach.
This strategy is also essential when you’re making a fundamental shift in architecture, such as adopting microservices to boost scalability and agility. That modular approach is particularly valuable for integrating AI components and optimizing how resources are allocated to AI models.
Ultimately, if legacy systems are holding back innovation—especially in AI-driven development—refactoring or re-architecting can set you up for future growth, long-term cost efficiency, and faster adoption of next-gen technologies.
Boris Berenberg
Refactoring or re-architecting during a cloud migration is justified when the long-term gains significantly outweigh the upfront investment. This strategy is ideal when scalability, agility, and security are critical business needs that legacy systems can’t meet.
In Hobsons’ case, migrating 14 applications and 50+ TB of data to AWS wasn’t just a lift-and-shift—it was an opportunity to build a more elastic, secure, and high-performing environment.
By leveraging AWS-native tools like Aurora, Jenkins CI, and auto-scaling groups, Hobsons achieved 30,000 transactions per minute with zero major outages.
Refactoring was essential to unlock cloud-native benefits like continuous delivery, cost optimization, and enhanced security—outcomes that wouldn’t be possible through rehosting alone.
Boris Berenberg
VP of Product, Modus Create
Krishnan T V
Refactoring/re-architecting for cloud migration is a strategic choice when simpler methods are insufficient. It’s deployed to leverage cloud-native capabilities like high elasticity, performance, and resilience, often by breaking down monoliths into microservices or integrating deeply with PaaS/SaaS.
This approach is ideal for modernizing applications built on obsolete tech, future-proofing, or adding significant new features.
While resource-intensive, refactoring addresses substantial technical debt, improves agility, and can yield long-term cost optimization by aligning with consumption-based pricing and reducing licensing fees. It’s driven by the need for strategic business transformation, enhanced developer velocity, and improved security.
This strategy is warranted when the long-term benefits of a fundamentally better, cloud-optimized application justify the significant upfront investment, making it a crucial step for applications central to future business success and innovation.
Krishnan T V
Founder, katalytx
On behalf of the Techronicler community of readers, we thank these leaders and experts for taking the time to share valuable insights that stem from years of experience and in-depth expertise in their respective niches.
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