The AWS migration checklist only works if the cloud account and DNS sit under the company from day one. Founders get stuck when the prototype lives in a personal account, secrets are in .env files committed once, and nobody has practiced a restore.

If I were sequencing the ten steps, I would put these first: separate staging from production, infrastructure you can recreate, CI that blocks bad merges, monitored deploys with a rollback path, and backups you have actually restored once. Kubernetes and multi-region can wait until those are boring.

Ascendra Ventures regularly takes that AWS production slice as a fixed-scope DevOps problem for teams that already have an app but no safe ship path. Useful companion to the steps in this post.