UPDATED 11:40 EST / DECEMBER 05 2025

Sriram Devanathan, director of software development at AWS Transform at Amazon Web Services Inc., discussed how agentic cloud modernization optimizes migrations at AWS re:Invent 2025. AI

From lift-and-shift to one-and-done: Inside AWS’ agentic cloud modernization push

The historic delay between moving workloads to the cloud and optimizing them for use is disappearing, thanks in large part to the emergence of agentic cloud modernization.

Enterprises are no longer content with multi-year timelines for digital transformation. Amazon Web Services Inc. is now using artificial intelligence to provide the velocity required to combine migration and modernization into a single step, according to Sriram Devanathan (pictured), director of software development at AWS Transform.

“The need to move, the impetus to move, is much higher than before,” Devanathan said. “People are seeing the benefits of agentic AI kick in … They’re looking at, ‘How do I modernize my systems, not just lift and shift, but how do I truly make them ready for this new age?’”

Devanathan spoke with John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, for an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AI-driven migration and the future of enterprise cloud transformation.

The mechanics of agentic cloud modernization

Legacy systems often suffer from a lack of available human expertise, particularly with older programming languages. AWS has already analyzed nearly one billion lines of COBOL code to assist customers, achieving up to 80% automation in some migration tasks, Devanathan noted. This is achieved through agents that perform deep dependency analysis and decomposition.

“You have an assessment agent that is … able to understand all your systems [and] draw relationships between the existing components,” Devanathan said. “Then after doing the dependency analysis, you can get to the next level, which is decomposition.”

This shifts the workflow from a sequential “migrate then modernize” approach to a simultaneous transformation. Customers are increasingly rejecting the old, slower methodologies in favor of immediate value, Devanathan explained.

“I think people are seeing the speed kick in, and so we’re very much hearing people tell us, ‘Well, I actually don’t want to do that,’” he said of customer sentiment. “‘I don’t want to do this two-step thing. I want to do it in one step.’”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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