Azure migration guide overview

The Migrate methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework guides readers through an iterative process of migrating one workload, or a small collection of workloads per release. In each iteration, you'll follow a process to assess, migrate, optimize, and promote to ensure that workloads are ready to meet production demands. That cloud-agnostic process can guide migration to any cloud provider.

This article guides you through a simplified version of the process to migrate from your on-premises environment to Azure.

Tip

For an interactive experience, view this guide in the Azure portal. Go to the Azure Quickstart Center in the Azure portal, select Azure migration guide, and then follow the step-by-step instructions.

Migration tools

This guide is the suggested path for your first migration to Azure. It exposes you to the methodology and the cloud-native tools that are most commonly used during migration to Azure. Those tools are presented across the following pages:

• Assess each workload's technical fit. Validate the technical readiness and suitability for migration.
• Migrate your services. Perform the actual migration by replicating on-premises resources to Azure.
• Manage costs and billing. Understand the tools required to control costs in Azure.
• Optimize and promote. Optimize for cost and performance balance before you promote your workload to production.
• Get assistance. Get help and support during your migration or post-migration activities.

In alignment with the best practices in the Ready methodology of the Cloud Adoption Framework, deploy a landing zone before you continue with this guide.

When to use this guide

Although the tools discussed in this guide support a wide variety of migration scenarios, this guide focuses on limited scope efforts with minimal complexity. To determine whether this migration guide is suitable for your project, consider whether the following conditions apply to your situation:

• The workloads for initial migration aren't mission critical and don't contain sensitive data.
• You're migrating a homogeneous environment.
• Only a few business units need to align to complete the migration.
• You're not planning to automate the entire migration.
• You're migrating a small number of servers.
• The dependency mapping of the components to be migrated is simple to define.
• Your industry has minimal regulatory requirements relevant to this migration.

If any of these conditions don't apply to your situation, consider other best practices for cloud migration. For more complex migrations, we recommend that you request assistance from one of our Microsoft teams or partners. Customers who engage with Microsoft or certified partners are more successful in these scenarios. More information about requesting assistance is available in this guide.

For more information, see:

• Best practices for cloud migration