Migrate or modernize your applications using Azure Migrate

Shikher

Microsoft

Apr 23, 2025

Enabling migration or modernization of workloads comprising Infra-Data-Web tiers of an application using Azure Migrate

Introduction

The journey to the cloud is an essential step for modern enterprises looking to leverage the benefits of security, innovation (AI), scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. To help unlock these benefits migration or modernization to Azure is critical for reasons such as colocation of IT assets. A crucial part of this transformation is understanding the current state of your IT infrastructure, including workloads, applications, and their interdependencies. Often, organizations aim to set their migration goals based on the applications they want to move to the cloud, rather than focusing on individual servers or databases in isolation.

In our endeavour to both simplify and enrich your cloud adoption journey. We are introducing new capabilities in Azure Migrate to help you achieve your goals.

About Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free platform for migrating to and modernizing in Azure. It provides IT resource discovery, assessment, business case analysis, planning, migration, and modernization capabilities in a workload agnostic manner. You can run and monitor your migration/ modernization journey from a single, secure portal.

Currently, Azure Migrate's application aware experience supports the discovery of following workloads: Windows Server, Linux, SQL Server, .NET webapp on IIS, and Java on Tomcat running on various platforms including, VMware, Microsoft, Bare-metal, AWS EC2, GCP CE, and Xen.

Further, it will support migration assessments for Azure VM, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database, App Service Code, App Service Containers, and Azure Kubernetes Service. Last, it will support in-line Lift and Shift migration to Azure VM.

Note: MySQL discovery and assessment is available in the classic experience only.

Introducing Application awareness in Azure Migrate

A key step in any cloud transformation plan is a current state analysis of the entire IT estate covering workloads and applications, and relationships/ dependencies among them.

We are excited to announce the preview of application aware experiences in Azure Migrate – across every phase of the migration journey. This allows you to gain insights into the total cost of ownership, identify suitable IaaS and PaaS targets, and receive tailored migration and modernization guidance.

To get started with Azure Migrate, simply create an Azure Migrate project on Azure portal, and leverage Azure Migrate’s wide-ranging discovery capabilities, including the Azure Migrate appliance or importing inventory via RVTools to discover your environment. Azure Migrate allows you to explore inventory across Infra-Data-Web tiers and use the updated dependency analysis to identify application boundaries. As part of the application aware experiences, we are introducing the concept of tags within Azure Migrate. So once dependencies are identified, you can group the dependent workloads comprising an application via tags.

“Tagging has significantly streamlined the assignment of applications name and its environment associations with discovered servers. We consider this feature to be highly advantageous, as it will assist in generating an application-based inventory and assessment. Furthermore, it will be instrumental in organizing a high-level migration move group.”

- Tata Consultancy Services (Engineering Practice (Azure) | AI.Cloud)

Next, Azure Migrate can be used to create application-specific business cases to identify savings and ROI, assess ideal migration strategies, and get recommendations for Azure services, SKUs, resource costs, and migration/modernization tools.

Further, as part of executing the migration and onboarding to Azure, customers can use the recommended tools to modernize via re-platform and refactor (out of band) techniques or use the integrated rehost migration experience to rehost to Azure VM.

Complemented with a refreshed user experience

As part of delivering application awareness and sustainability insights, Azure Migrate will also feature a refreshed user interface. The new experience is designed to help you in every step of your migration journey – across Decide, Plan and Execute phases. The experience provides you with a new intuitive table of contents and overview page to allow easy navigation. You can explore discovered workloads and their relationships through effective search, sort, and seamless transition from Azure Migrate to other specialized migration tools, depending on your specific goals and requirements. Finally, you can quickly create and visualize different migration and modernization strategies side-by-side.

“There has been a notable improvement in User Experience, where with the help of Overview page I can Explore and run assessment, Business case once I access Azure Migrate.

Action Centre feature will be highly beneficial to track the issues, which was quite useful in our customer validation.”

- Tata Consultancy Services (Engineering Practice (Azure) | AI.Cloud)

Interested in trying the new feature-set and experience?

The capabilities described above are currently in preview. You can try the new feature-set and experience by selecting the banner shown below from the classic Azure Migrate experience, or by using the URL https://aka.ms/AzureMigrate/Preview.