Arjun Chopra, the chief technology officer of smartShift Technologies, appeared on theCUBE at Amazon’s recently concluded re:Invent 2013 conference to share his insider’s perspective on porting legacy workloads to the public cloud.

An AWS Premier Consulting Partner, smartShift helps enterprises re-architect their on-premise applications before shipping them off to an infrastructure-as-a-service environment. That involves removing bottlenecks, adding automation and orchestration capabilities, and ensuring that security and performance requirements are met at all times. Chopra says that his firm leverages a set of homegrown solutions to greatly accelerate customers’ journey to the cloud, a value proposition that attracted 10 of the world’s largest financial services providers.

Asked about smartShift’s partnership with Amazon, the executive details that they share leads with one another and collaborate to develop use cases for new technologies.

Elaborating, Chopra says that his firm helps companies migrate two types of workloads: “tactical” processes such as test and dev environments, which are usually moved to AWS due to cost considerations, and mission-critical systems like Oracle and SAP implementations. Porting the latter is much more difficult.

“We’ll typically sit with the customer then understand what that optimal architecture looks like, then the next stage is to automate and orchestrate a lot of that,” he details. “So it’s one thing to stand up a system, but then it’s another thing to make sure it stays up and it’s got the necessary automation so if you need to make a copy of that system or that entire deployment for debugging purposes, you want to have a test-dev system that’s a replica of production, you want to have something that you hand over to your sales guys for demos.”

A sizable portion of smartShift’s clients maintain hybrid environments, Chopra continues, with some components running in the cloud and others in-house.

Click the video below to watch the full interview.