[Updated January 17 2024: Check out this blog post by Olia Gavrysh for more details and a walkthrough of the capabilities]
Enterprise application migrations often require deep insights and stakeholder alignment across a variety of use cases, whether at the portfolio or application level. Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free platform for migrating to and modernizing in Azure. It provides discovery, assessment, business case analysis, planning, migration, and modernization capabilities in a consistent manner across workloads. All this while allowing you to run and monitor the proceedings from a single, secure portal. Today, we are excited to announce application and code assessment capabilities in Azure Migrate to help accelerate your application migrations.
The new capability is a comprehensive, first-party solution from Microsoft offered at no additional cost to help you assess your application’s code and common resources and provide insight into known conditions. In this release, both .NET and Java workloads are supported to help identify opportunities to migrate them to Azure. By analyzing existing codebases for the cloud, this feature in Azure Migrate gives you early insight and understanding of both on-premises and cloud environment for your apps and saves your organization precious time, resources, and cost over-runs in the project.
Prioritize and plan to eliminate surprises in your application migration
Using advanced analysis techniques to understand the structure and dependencies of supported .NET and Java applications, the tool provides guidance on how to replatform and migrate the applications to Azure. It simplifies your planning for migration from on-premises platforms by examining application artifacts, including project source directories and application archives, then highlighting areas needing changes.
Your developers can benefit from sophisticated analysis techniques in Azure Migrate application and code assessment to gain insights into the composition and interconnections of any .NET or Java application, regardless of your code base. This knowledge can then be used to prioritize and plan for the migration project in a way that reduces costs and enables faster time to value.
Figure 1(a): Application and code assessment for .NET
Figure 1(b): Application and code assessment for Java
Tailored guidance to address common pain points
Migrating to and in the cloud often involves adjustments in the architecture and infrastructure of an application:
- On-premises applications are often built to operate within specific security and network configurations and hardware environments, which may require changes to align with the cloud’s distributed and scalable nature.
- Developers may need to adapt new deployment models and restructure their applications or reconfigure databases in the cloud.
- To preserve data integrity and security during the transition, developers may need to implement new encryption and access control measures to safeguard sensitive information.
- Legacy software may rely on outdated dependencies or libraries that may be incompatible with cloud platforms, requiring fixes.
The new capability supports multiple use cases and scenarios, including:
- Enhancing connectivity between applications and external resources for optimal Azure service utilization
- Evaluating code patterns for cloud-hosted resources like databases, messaging queues, logging systems, and more
- Analyzing code patterns to enhance security measures
- Upgrading commonly used libraries and frameworks
In addition, users can evaluate an application's compatibility with multiple Azure deployment destinations such as Application Service, Container Apps, Spring Apps, and more. The tool provides insights into the effort required and any necessary modifications needed to successfully replatform their applications onto Azure. Existing applications can seamlessly incorporate Azure services to enhance functionalities, such as enabling full-text searching, secure storage of application secrets, or integrating vision, speech, and language capabilities.
Get valuable insight into your assessment
After examining your application artifacts, Azure Migrate application and code assessment generates a detailed report that evaluates your current environment and lists modifications to your application that would be necessary for Azure compatibility. Available in both Visual Studio and command line interface, these reports can save you a significant amount of time and effort, especially for large-scale projects. There is also a wide array of customization options, so you can fine-tune the analysis to your specific needs.
Once you have generated a report, you can export the data to a variety of formats, including CSV, JSON, HTML files. This allows you to import and manipulate the data in spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc. This can be helpful for sorting, analyzing, and evaluating the data, as well as for creating custom reports.
Next steps and getting started
Visit the product documentation to learn more about the new Azure Migrate application and code assessment feature. It includes usage guide, rules development guide, and frequently asked questions, as well as instructions for installing and using the tools for .NET and Java. Our team is always keen to hear your feedback; please share your experiences, suggestions, and report any issues regarding this feature by emailing appcat@microsoft.com.
Learn more about recent Azure Migrate features and don’t miss the sessions and demos on migrating enterprise apps at Microsoft Ignite, our annual flagship conference. Register free for the Microsoft Ignite experience.
(This post is co-authored with Shiva Shastri, Michael Yen-Chi Ho, Olia Gavrysh, and Bruno Borges)
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