The Strangler pattern was first coined by Martin Fowler in 2004 (https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerApplication.html) after the amazing Australian Strangler Vines. These vines envelop their host fig tree and eventually kill off the host and support themselves. This is an excellent analogy for how we want to incrementally migrate and re-architect a legacy system into a cloud-native system. This is not a big-bang, high-risk process. It is a methodical process that leaves the legacy system in place for as long as necessary, while valuable enhancements are made around the legacy system using the new architecture.
A critical aspect of this approach is the notion of valuable enhancements. Traditional migrations can stretch on and on with skyrocketing costs and with little to no perceived business value being created. These projects rarely end well. Instead...