Source workloads
Cloud / Knowledge library
Azure Migrate
Provides discovery, assessment, dependency analysis, and migration tooling for Azure
Why learn Azure Migrate?
Teams use Azure Migrate to adopt cloud migration assessment and orchestration without building the complete underlying platform themselves.
The problem it solves
Discovers, assesses, plans, and tracks workload migration
Where it came from
Azure Migrate is Microsoft Azure's offering for cloud migration assessment and orchestration. Its closest catalog counterparts are AWS Migration Hub and Google Cloud Migration Center; they address the same broad need but are not feature-for-feature identical.
Build your understanding
Work through these exercises in order. Try the task before opening a reference.
- Explain the main responsibility of Azure Migrate.
- Choose a workload that fits Azure Migrate.
- Identify one operational tradeoff of Azure Migrate.
- Compare Azure Migrate with AWS Migration Hub.
- Compare Azure Migrate with Google Cloud Migration Center.
Documentation and sources
- Microsoft Azure product catalog (azure.microsoft.com)
Connect the ideas
Alternatives
Real World Example
Legacy Data Center Consolidation
Enterprises operating aging on-premises server infrastructure that require a transition to cloud-native environments.
The business problem
Organizations often lack visibility into complex inter-server dependencies, leading to broken application functionality when migrating monolithic workloads to the cloud.
How this topic solves it
Azure Migrate provides a centralized hub for discovery, assessment, and dependency analysis, allowing teams to map network connections between servers before migration to ensure application integrity.
- Deploy the Azure Migrate appliance within the local environment to initiate server discovery.
- Enable dependency analysis to capture real-time network traffic patterns between servers.
- Review assessment reports to identify right-sizing recommendations for target Azure virtual machines.
- Execute the migration of validated server groups using the integrated replication tooling.
The flow from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud migration target.
Discovery engine
Dependency analysis
Cloud destination
- On-Prem Servers → Discovery → Azure Migrate Appliance
- Azure Migrate Appliance → Data ingestion → Azure Assessment
- Azure Assessment → Migration execution → Azure Target
Expected business outcome
A risk-mitigated migration path where application dependencies are preserved, reducing post-migration downtime and configuration errors.
Limitations and checks
Dependency analysis relies on agent-based or agentless data collection; if the appliance cannot reach the source servers or if traffic is encrypted in a way that obscures headers, the dependency mapping may remain incomplete. Verify by checking the 'Dependencies' tab in the Azure Migrate portal for missing connection data.