AWS launched the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to make it easier and more cost-effective for businesses to move to its cloud. MAP is ideal for businesses looking to migrate from on-premises or other cloud providers to AWS while minimizing costs and operational risks.

In this article, we’ll cover AWS MAP and its benefits, how it works, and strategies for maximizing your financial benefits with MAP.

What is the AWS MAP Program

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is designed to help companies move their on-premises workloads to AWS with a structured approach and financial support. AWS provides migration credits to offset some of the initial costs, making the transition more manageable.

The program also includes best practices, methodologies, and technical guidance based on the many migrations that AWS has performed to help streamline the process, reducing the complexity and risks typically associated with cloud migration. It uses a three-phased approach (Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate and Modernize) that we’ll discuss in more detail later in the article.

Image source: AWS

What are the benefits of AWS MAP?

The key benefits of the AWS MAP program include:

Accelerated and Streamlined Migration:

MAP speeds up the migration process, enabling a faster transition of workloads and applications to the AWS cloud. It also provides methodologies and best practices to help mitigate the risks associated with your cloud migration journey.

Financial Incentives:

AWS provides AWS MAP credits based on migrated workload spend. This offsets initial migration costs and makes it more cost-effective to move your resources to AWS.

Opportunities for Modernization:

Beyond just lifting and shifting workloads, MAP encourages modernization—whether that means refactoring applications, improving security, or aligning with cloud best practices. But it’s not automatic; taking full advantage of this requires effort and investment on your end.

Comprehensive Training & Support:

AWS offers training, resources, and best practices as support for your migration journey. You can also get access to AWS migration experts, solutions architects, and tailored professional services engagements.

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How does the AWS Migration Acceleration Program work?

There are three basic steps in AWS MAP: determining if you’re ready to migrate to AWS, preparing your workloads to migrate, and actually migrating. Here’s a brief overview:

1 - Assess Your Readiness

In this first step, you conduct a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) to evaluate your organization’s preparedness across six AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) dimensions: business, process, people, platform, operations, and security. You should also do a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis to ensure it makes financial sense to migrate to AWS.

If you’re looking for support, AWS and AWS partners can help with assessments and guidance.

Image source: AWS

2 - Mobilize Your Resources

This phase focuses on closing those gaps by developing a detailed migration plan, running proof-of-concept (PoC) implementations, and setting up a secure AWS Landing Zone. It’s also the time to train teams, conduct Well-Architected Reviews, and implement automation tools to streamline large-scale migrations.

AWS Migration Tools

Image source: AWS

3 - Migrate and Modernize

In this step, you actually move workloads to AWS using migration services, partners, and automation tools. Proper tagging is required to track eligible spending and receive AWS MAP credits. Modernization can involve refactoring applications, adopting AWS-managed services, and optimizing infrastructure for performance and cost efficiency.

To support your migration project, AWS offers a suite of migration tools. For example, AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) simplifies rehosting by automatically converting source servers to run natively on AWS, minimizing downtime. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) enables seamless database transitions with minimal disruption, whether you’re moving to RDS or a different database engine. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) simplifies lift-and-shift migrations by automating server replication. These tools work alongside MAP incentives to lower migration costs and operational burdens.

How to maximize your financial benefit with AWS MAP

To get the most out of AWS MAP, you need to ensure your workloads are properly tagged before migration—otherwise, you won’t receive credits, and AWS won’t retroactively apply them.

This often becomes a challenge when finance teams expect a certain amount of credit, but engineering teams handling the migration aren’t aligned on tagging requirements. If these teams aren’t in sync, workloads can be migrated without the necessary tags, leaving credits on the table.

Understand What MAP Applies To

If you don’t know which workloads qualify or whether they’re tagged correctly, it’s easy to miss out on financial incentives. Before migration, ensure you understand which workloads and infrastructure components are eligible for AWS MAP funding, and which workloads that are eligible have been tagged (versus still need to be tagged).

Since AWS only applies MAP credits to workloads that are tagged before migration, having a system to track eligibility and tagging status is critical. Without this, you risk losing credits simply because of tagging oversight.

nOps gives you real-time visibility into which workloads have been properly tagged for AWS MAP credits and which still need attention, ensuring you stay on track and don’t miss any tags.

Tag Properly

It’s key to note that AWS MAP credits aren’t automatically applied to all migrated workloads—they’re only issued for workloads that meet AWS’s tagging requirements before migration. If workloads aren’t tagged properly, MAP funding can be delayed or lost entirely, and AWS won’t retroactively apply them after the fact.

To ensure projected savings align with actual credits received, finance teams need visibility into tagged MAP spend alongside total AWS spend. That requires a structured tagging approach:

  • Tag workloads before migration. AWS uses a required tagging system to track MAP-eligible workloads, making proper tagging essential for cost and usage tracking.
  • Use AWS Cost Allocation Tags. These help separate MAP-eligible costs from general cloud spending, ensuring only the right workloads count toward credits.
  • Regularly audit and validate tags. Since AWS won’t apply credits to workloads tagged after migration, it’s critical to confirm that all eligible workloads are properly tagged ahead of time.
  • Align finance and engineering teams. Finance expects MAP funding based on migration agreements, but engineering owns the implementation. Without a shared tagging strategy, workloads can be migrated without the required tags, leading to missed credits and reduced financial benefits.

Track Your Progress & Forecast Credits

AWS MAP credits aren’t guaranteed—they’re applied quarterly and only after migrating at least $50,000 worth of workloads. Finance teams need to forecast credits accurately to ensure cost expectations align with reality, but AWS doesn’t provide upfront visibility into how much credit you’ll receive. The only way to avoid surprises is to track actual migration progress, tagging accuracy, and credit eligibility in real time.

To stay on top of this, use AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) and AWS Cost Management tools to:

  • Track how many credits you’ve received in previous quarter to ensure projections match reality.
  • Identify gaps where workloads were migrated but not tagged correctly, preventing credit loss.
  • Adjust migration timelines based on credit consumption rates to avoid exceeding quarterly thresholds or leaving credits unused.

Instead of setting up your own custom dashboards, you can use nOps to track all of your key MAP metrics: tagged and untagged workloads, how much AWS funding you’ve received and expect to receive, migration progress and more:

Track tags, credits and migration progress in the nOps MAP tracker
This proactive approach empowers you to optimize costs and ensure that you achieve the highest possible financial benefits from your cloud migration strategies.

About nOps

nOps is absolutely free to use, and it just takes a few minutes to configure your AWS environment and MAP project in the tool.

At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize, so you can focus on building and innovating. nOps is an AWS Migration Competency Partner and an AWS Well-Architected Partner, and we recently ranked #1 in cloud cost management with five stars by G2.

Join our customers using nOps to effortlessly save on AWS by booking a demo today!