What Does Lift and Shift Mean?

“Lift and shift” is a particular technique in software migration where an application or code base is simply taken out of one environment and placed in another environment, without significant underlying design change.

Techopedia Explains Lift and Shift

The lift and shift approach has been popular for many legacy migration projects. However, it has to be contrasted with various alternatives. One alternative is re-architecting, where the application or code base in question gets fundamentally redesigned in order to work in a different environment. Another alternative is re-factoring, where an application is changed when it reaches the new environment, i.e., the cloud.