Microsoft offers best practices for planning transition to their Cloud services through their Migration Centre, including a detailed white paper, as well as a number of customizations to support the migration.
Services like Azure Site Recovery and Database Migration Service are available to migrate your workloads to Azure.
The Migration Center offers a TCO calculator, and Yusuf Rangwala offers a checklist. Savient Consulting writes in their blog about 10 Azure Migration Challenges and Ways to overcome them, and AIS describes ‘lift and shift process‘.
As you get down into the specific technical details such as database migration Joseph Sack offers this blog to explore.
Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure
The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure is the One Microsoft approach to cloud adoption in Azure, consolidating and sharing best practices from Microsoft employees, partners, and customers. The framework gives customers a set of tools, guidance, and narratives that help shape technology, business, and people strategies for driving desired business outcomes during their adoption effort.
In the Cloud Migration Journey planning they describe:
- Rehost – Often referred to as “lift and shift” migration, this no-code option lets you migrate your existing applications to Azure quickly. Each application is migrated as is, which provides the benefits of the cloud without the risks or costs of making code changes.
- Refactor – Often referred to as repackage, this cloud migration strategy involves some change to the application design but no wholesale changes to the application code.
- Rearchitect – Modify or extend your application’s code base to scale and optimise it for the cloud.
- Rebuild – Rebuild an application from scratch using cloud-native technologies.
Determining whether to migrate to IaaS (“lift and shift”) or PaaS highlights the value of the first Digital Transformation planning process, to identify whether the benefits sought are purely related to the replacement of server hardware, or if transformation of software development and business process are also key goals.
