VM Migration Factory

This mission turns VM work into a repeatable workflow: request, provision, configure, register, monitor, and route traffic.

It is useful for migrations, provider changes, or teams that still run important workloads outside Kubernetes and need the same discipline: reviewable changes, clear inventory, and no hidden manual steps.

When this is NOT a fit

• You only create a few short-lived VMs per year and manual provisioning is already documented, reviewed, and low-risk.
• The target platform, IP plan, naming scheme, or ownership model is still undecided.
• Existing workloads cannot tolerate even planned cutovers, DNS changes, or load-balancer registration windows.
• The organization wants a one-time lift-and-shift without keeping the automation as an operated product afterward.

Common failure modes we’ve seen

• Terraform creates the VM, but inventory, DNS, monitoring, backup policy, and load-balancer registration still require tickets and manual edits.
• Golden images drift from Ansible roles, so the first boot succeeds but patching, users, agents, and hardening differ by provider.
• NetBox or Consul is treated as a secondary record instead of the source of truth, which breaks automation during migrations.
• Cutover plans miss connection draining, health checks, or rollback triggers, causing avoidable incidents during otherwise simple moves.