Final answer:
A company planning to move to the AWS Cloud must evaluate its applications and decide whether to use a lift and shift approach to EC2 instances, refactor using AWS Lambda, rebuild using AWS Elastic Beanstalk, or containerize with AWS Fargate based on cost-effectiveness and suitability.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question pertains to cloud migration strategies for legacy applications to the AWS Cloud, keeping cost-effectiveness in mind. A recommended approach would depend on the specific needs and constraints of the company. However, discussing the given options briefly:
- Lift and shift to EC2 instances might be the simplest, fastest and initially most cost-effective method if the applications have dependencies on the OS level or aren't designed for cloud-native environments.
- Refactoring applications using AWS Lambda can make them more scalable and potentially more cost-effective in the long term due to Lambda's pay-per-use model, but it requires an investment in modification.
- Rebuilding applications using AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a more labor-intensive approach, which might provide better optimization for the cloud but also incurs higher upfront costs and time investment.
- Using AWS Fargate to containerize the applications can be beneficial for applications that are suitable for containerization, providing both scalability and potentially better resource utilization.
In summary, a company should evaluate its current applications' architectures, future maintainability, and the expected ROI to decide on the best approach.