Companies that join the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) are often surprised by how the money actually reaches them. MAP funding is not paid when the agreement is signed. It is earned as the migration happens, and it only counts the AWS spend that AWS can trace back to the migration plan. Miss one of the steps that make that tracing possible and the funding for those workloads is lost, even if the migration itself went well.
This guide walks through those steps in order: what has to be in place before any credits are generated, what makes migrated spend count, what does not count, and how to check your own numbers. If you are new to MAP, start with our overview of MAP for companies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which explains the three phases and who the programme is for.
The milestones, in order
AWS sets the detailed terms of each MAP agreement privately, so amounts and schedules differ from one migration to the next. The order of the steps does not:
| Milestone | What has to be true | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Business case agreed | The Assess phase is done: your current estate is inventoried, the cost comparison is complete and the projected AWS spend after the move is estimated. | The basis on which the MAP agreement, and its funding, is sized. |
| 2. Migration plan accepted | AWS and your company have signed the migration plan. It carries your project number, known as the MPE ID, and names the management (payer) accounts the migration runs in. | The start line. Only resources launched after the acceptance date are eligible. |
| 3. Tracking switched on | The map-migrated cost allocation tag is active in the payer account, Cost Explorer is enabled and the people migrating have permission to tag. | AWS can see which spend comes from the migration. |
| 4. Workloads migrated and tagged | Each wave lands on eligible services, inside the named accounts, with the correct tag value on every migrated resource. | That spend now counts towards your incentives. |
| 5. First credits received | AWS has issued the first tranche of credits against tagged spend. | The MAP 2.0 dashboard in the billing console, where you track tagged and untagged eligible spend. |
Milestones one and two are business milestones: they decide how much funding the migration can earn. Milestones three and four are technical, and they decide how much of it you actually receive. Most of the lost funding we hear about happens in steps three and four.
The tag that decides what counts
AWS identifies migrated workloads with a single tag. Its MAP guide says the tag is what reports the migrated workloads' spend and generates the incentives, and that MAP cannot provide them if the migrated resources are not tagged. The rules are strict:
- The key is map-migrated, exactly. It is case sensitive. No capital letters, no spaces, no variations.
- The value comes from your MPE ID. For most services it is mig followed by the ID: mig12345 for a five-digit ID, or migABCDE12345 for a ten-character one. SAP and Oracle workloads use sap and oracle instead of mig. The prefix is lowercase; the letters in a long MPE ID are uppercase.
- It goes on as each workload moves. AWS expects workload owners to tag resources as they migrate them, wave by wave, until the whole scope is done. It is not a clean-up task for the end.
- It must be in the right accounts. The migration has to happen under the management (payer) account in the plan, or accounts linked to it. Resources in other accounts do not count.
- Automate it where you can. AWS Application Migration Service can add the tag to launched instances automatically, but only to EC2 instances and EBS volumes. Databases, storage and everything else need tags in your CloudFormation or Terraform templates, or a bulk tagging step.
What does not count
These are the gaps that most often cost companies part of their funding:
- Resources that already existed. AWS's MAP guide states that only resources launched after the agreement acceptance date are eligible. Tagging an instance you were already running does not turn it into migrated spend.
- Existing S3 buckets, unless declared. AWS recommends new buckets for migrated data. If you have to reuse a bucket, its ARN and current baseline spend must be given to your AWS account team and added to the agreement before it can count.
- Services outside the included list. AWS publishes the list of services that are eligible for MAP credits. Spend on anything else is not counted, however well it is tagged.
- Data transfer. AWS's own Cost Explorer report for eligible spend filters out data transfer usage, so do not plan around it.
- Untagged or mistagged spend. A typo in the key or the MPE ID has the same effect as no tag at all. Do not count on spend from before a tag was applied.
How to check your tagged spend
You do not have to wait for the first credits to see whether the tagging is working. AWS documents a Cost Explorer report that shows tagged and untagged eligible spend for each management account:
- Open Cost Explorer in the payer account named in your migration plan, and set the date range to the migration period.
- Exclude the services that are not eligible for MAP, using AWS's included services list.
- Exclude data transfer in both the usage type and usage type group filters.
- Group by the map-migrated tag, or filter on it, to split tagged from untagged spend. Use amortised costs.
- Investigate any untagged eligible spend from migrated workloads straight away, and fix the tag in the template that created it so the next wave is right.
Run the report after every wave, not once a quarter. A missing tag found in week two costs a few days of spend; one found at the end of the migration can cost months.
If MAP is too big for your migration
MAP is built for migrations at scale. If yours is a handful of servers, the milestones above may never apply, and that is fine. A partner at Select tier or above can request partner funding for a smaller, well-scoped migration, and a funded proof of concept can answer the technical questions first. Our credit programmes guide compares the routes.
Next steps
If you are planning an AWS migration, or already in one and unsure whether your tagging is counting, our free credit eligibility check takes a few minutes. We come back with the routes that could realistically apply and what each would need from you. Nothing here is a promise of funding: AWS decides every request.