Migrate Without Missing a Beat
Transition legacy systems to a resilient, cloud-ready microservices architecture — without stalling the business
Business line leaders feel the squeeze
But can your technology stack keep up?
Move before you’re moved
"Cloud is the foundation to our plans, and it will enable us to deploy digital solutions to the frontline quickly and at scale. Cloud will dramatically reduce the amount of hardware on sites and reduce costs."
Laura Tyler, CTO
BHP
source: microsoft.com
"Our North Star is to use technology in everything that we do. We’ve invested strategically to build best-in-class technology platforms with our core infrastructure in the cloud and a modernized, scalable network.”
Susan Morris, COO and CEO-elect Albertsons
source: CIO Dive
"When it comes to cloud migrations, we saw accelerating demand, with customers in every industry, from Abercrombie & Fitch Co., to Coca-Cola and ServiceNow..."
source: microsoft.com
Steps to a sustainable culture of innovation
Steps to a Sustainable Culture of Practical Innovation
Questions we'll answer along the way. Where are you in the journey?
Aware
How do other companies innovate?
How can we introduce or accelerate innovation?
How do we align our strategy with innovation?
Experiment
How can we try out new ways of work with less risk?
How do we demonstrate success quickly?
Enable
How can we secure executive support org-wide?
Is this something we can introduce to a broader group?
What other vehicles of innovation exist?
Transform
How do we make innovation a priority and sustain?
What are the key aspects required to transform our organization?
Anvil Top Advisors Tailored Offerings at Each Step
Aware
Intro to Lean Innovation: 2-hour session with a short presentation and ask-me-anything session on Lean Innovation
Practical Innovation Workshop: 1-2 days of defining personas, day-in-the-life, areas of opportunity, and designing experiments
Working Backwards Workshop: 1-2 days of learning to work backwards from delighting your customer, culminating in authoring your first Press Release and FAQ
Experiment
SEO Optimization
AI Content Generator
Steps to a durable cloud & microservices transformation
Assess
Organizations in this stage often ask
Where are our true bottlenecks—workflows, data, org, or systems?
Which systems belong in the cloud, which stay, and which retire?
What are the risks (regulatory, vendor lock-in, outage blast radius)?
What Anvil Top Advisors offers
Cloud Readiness Scorecard (1 week): architecture, security/compliance, team/process readiness—written report & readout.
North-Star Definition (3 days): target platform principles (domains, contracts, golden paths) and success measures.
Key Outcomes: Facts gathered, risks cataloged, north-star defined. No designs or plans yet.
Envision
Organizations in this stage often ask
How do we carve domains and define the first service boundaries?
What does a minimal platform look like for day-one success?
How do we wrap legacy so we can ship value before full decommission?
What Anvil Top Advisors offers
Domain & Boundary Mapping Workshop (1–2 days): event storming, bounded contexts, data ownership. Assess replatforming vs re-architecting tradeoffs, migration-rollout approach
Tenets & Guardrails: <expand>
Migration Strategy Review (1-2 weeks): review your candidate patterns (Strangler-Fig, façades/ACLs, APIs, compute, storage, Analytics), foundational and operational data, CI/CD, secrets, observability, zero-trust posture, migration-rollout strategy. Tempered guidance on IDP/paved-road options and minimum viable guardrails.
Key outcomes: Target domains & initial boundaries chosen; reference patterns agreed, rollout strategy aligned. No pilot or timelines yet.
Plan
Organizations in this stage often ask
What’s a low-risk, high-signal first slice and how will we measure success?
How do we run leadership reviews and hold teams accountable without slowing them?
What assumptions, risks, and known-unknowns must be surfaced now to avoid surprises?
How do we avoid “microservices sprawl” on day one?
What Anvil Top Advisors offers
Pilot Planning Workshop (2 days): pick the slice; define milestones, owners, budget, and success metrics (DORA, SLOs, MTTR, cost per txn).
Risk Model Pack (3 days): Assumptions & Risk-Mapping Workshop to elevate unknowns; decide tests; log mitigations. Data-cutover, blast-radius, and rollback patterns tailored to the slice; checklist & templates.
Timeline and Resourcing Review (3 days): Review timeline and plan from team, assess uncertainty buffers for known-unknown, review resourcing and task fungibility, identify accelerators to speed-up learning.
Incentives sanity check (1 day): align KPIs/bonuses to SLOs and time-to-value to avoid policy-vs-practice friction.
Leadership & Review Mechanisms (2-4 days): design lightweight operating rhythms: weekly pilot review, change approval rubric, “slow/stop-when-breach” rules (SLO/error budget & spend), pilot runs, blameless retrospectives.
Decider group chartered - Business, Engineering, Ops, Product (1 day): with a 30 min bi-weekly review; we facilitate the first two, then hand off.
Key outcomes: Pilot plan, risks/assumptions, reviews designed, templates delivered. Your team starts building.
Your Team Builds
Organizations in this stage often ask
How do we keep build quality high while moving fast?
Are we instrumented well enough to know when it’s safe?
How do we coach teams without creating consultant dependency?
What Anvil Top Advisors offers
Design Reviews (½–1 day per sprint): review designs / diagrams or whiteboard sessions for service boundaries, contracts, resiliency patterns, design-choice trade-offs.
Progress Reviews (as needed): coach teams and leaders in reviewing status, path to green, risk miigation steps, plan adjustments.
Edge-ownership (as part of reviews): track % decisions made by the engineering teams vs executive leaders or decider team (goal: week-over-week increase).
Observability & SLO Clinics (2 sessions): train on traces/metrics/logs; finalize SLOs/error budgets & dashboards.
Security & Readiness Review (1 day): secrets/IAM, SBOM/vuln scanning, least-privilege checks—using your toolchain.
Game-Day Design Workshop (1 day): failure modes, rollback drills, and abort criteria (no hands-on ops).
Platform “Office Hours” (1 day): unblockers for IDP, CI/CD, IaC usage, Legacy System discovery — coaching only.
Key Outcomes: Service built on your golden-path templates, dashboards live, game-day scripted, release checklist ready,
Rollout
Organizations in this stage often ask
How do we cut over data safely and stage traffic without customer pain?
What constitutes a go/no-go and automatic rollback?
What proof do we need to declare the pilot “done” and scale the pattern?
What Anvil Top Advisors offers
Cutover Plan Review (1–2 days): validate CDC/dual-write/shadow-read steps, integrity checks, and fallback paths.
Progressive Delivery Playbook (1 day): canary/ramp schedule, health gates, rollback triggers—customized for your stack.
Dry-Run Facilitation (½ day): table-top exercise using your runbooks; tighten the plan.
Go-Live Readiness Review (½ day): independence checklist; confirm owners, paging, dashboards, thresholds, and comms plan. Runbook DRIs named (product, ops, security), reverse-shadow window scheduled.
Post-Release Audit (1 day): review SLOs/MTTR, defects, cost deltas, and lessons learned; finalize “scale-out” recommendations.
Key Outcomes: Pilot live with proven rollback and measured outcomes; decision package prepared for broader migration waves. We exit or move into a new advisory wave by separate agreement.
Steps to a sustainable culture of innovation
Awareness
How do we align our strategy with innovation?
Working Backwards Workshop: 1-2 days of defining personas, day-in-the-life, and areas of opportunity, culminating in design of 2-3 experiments
Experiment
Enablement
Transformation
About us
Why trust us?
We’ve carried the pager. Leaders who’ve run modernization in-house at Amazon, AWS clients, Citrix, Meta, Philips. Outcomes rested on us—not slides.
No quota, no software to sell. We’re tech-agnostic and time-boxed. Our incentives align with your speed to autonomy, not billable hours.
Field-first, factory-ready. We work at the coalface—ops floors, stores, plants—turning migration patterns into repeatable playbooks your teams can run.
We get out of your way: We publish a graduation checklist at kickoff and “reverse-shadow” near the end so your team leads while we step back.
Connect with Anvil Top Advisors
Ready to evolve your organization’s culture, technology, and leadership? Reach out to our team of tech industry veterans to discuss how our focused advisory can help you get past the start line. Fill out the form below and one of our advisors will get in touch with you today.