Table of Contents:
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What is Cloud Migration?
The process of moving data, services, and other business components to a cloud computing environment improves scalability and efficiency while also assisting in cutting the company’s IT expenses.
What is Azure?
Microsoft introduced its Azure cloud computing platform in February 2010. Microsoft Azure is, to put it simply, a platform for agile cloud computing that users can utilize to build, manage, and deploy apps and services through Microsoft data centers.
More than 200 physical data centers run by Microsoft Azure are located all over the world, and each one has numerous connected computer servers.
Here are a few key facts about Microsoft Azure:
- Flexible – Modify the computing resources as necessary.
- Open- almost every OS, language, tool, or framework is supported.
- Reliable- 99.95% availability SLA (Service-Level agreements) and 24×7 tech support
- Global- Data housed in geosynchronous data centers
- Economical- pay for what you use
Azure cloud service is the best public cloud service in the market since it is quickly adaptable and economical.
What is Azure Migrate?
Microsoft’s Azure Migrate is a tool that helps businesses to monitor the discovery, evaluation, and migration of on-premises workloads and data to the Azure environment with the help of a centralized portal.
Azure Migration Process
A four-step process is followed for migrating applications and workloads to Azure.
Stage 1: Assess
You must explicitly outline your goals and objectives for migration during the initial stage.
Next, calculate how much you can save by transferring your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud – Microsoft offers a useful calculator that may assist you with this.
You must compile a list of all the applications—that is, all the physical and virtual servers—that you’re using in your on-premises environment for the last step of the Assess phase. This data can be used to map your servers and detect prerequisites, and dependencies. According to your goals and any dependencies, this will help you decide which apps to migrate to the cloud first, providing a strong foundation for your Azure migration plan.
Stage 2: Migrate
You must decide on your cloud migration approach for the second stage of the cloud migration process. There are several alternatives available:
- Rehost
- Refactor
- Rearchitect
- Rebuild
Stage 3: Optimize
You’re ready to optimize once you’ve chosen a cloud migration approach that fits your goals and objectives and successfully moved your on-premises environment to Azure. Anything can be optimized, including corporate operations and cloud computing costs.
Stage 4: Secure&Manage
The Azure cloud migration process’s final phase is all about security. Microsoft provides many market-leading security tools and services that provide comprehensive visibility into potential security risks and superior cloud security management. Microsoft offers you all the resources you need to safeguard your cloud environment’s data and keep an eye on its health, from Azure Security Center to Azure Log Analytics, so you can be confident in its security and top performance.
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To move data from on-premises to the cloud, Azure offers a variety of tools and services. The business justification for migration determines the technologies to be used. Let’s look into a few such tools:
Azure Migrate
A fast migration, modernization, and optimization solution for Azure are provided by Azure Migrate. Discovery, evaluations and the appropriate scaling of on-premises resources for infrastructure, data, and apps are all included in the pre-migration process. Integrating third-party solutions with Azure Migrate flexible architecture may expand the number of use cases covered. It provides these things:
- Range of tools: The Azure Migrate utilities include Azure Migrate: Server Migration and Azure Migrate: Discovery and Assessment. Additionally, Azure Migrate interfaces with other Azure tools and services as well as solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs).
- Unified migration platform: A solo gateway to launch, manage, and monitor your Azure migration.
- Assessment, migration, and modernization: Azure Migrate hub can be used for assessing, migrating, and modernizing.
- Servers, databases, and web apps:
Web apps and SQL Server instances on local servers may be evaluated and moved to the Azure virtual machine or the Azure VMware solution.
- Web applications:
Evaluation and migration of on-premises web apps to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
- Databases: Analyze existing on-premises SQL Server instances and databases to migrate them to Azure SQL Managed Instances, Azure SQL Databases, or SQL Server on an Azure VM.
- Virtual desktops: Evaluation and migration of on-premises web apps to Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
- Data: Utilize Azure Data Box products to swiftly and affordably migrate huge amounts of data to Azure.
Azure Data Migration Services
On Azure, you have access to a number of PaaS and IaaS options for hosting your databases. Azure Data Migration Assistant (DMA) and Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) help in this process by analyzing existing databases, recommending corrections as necessary, and approving the migration.
What is Azure Data Migration Assistant(DMA)?
DMA aids the migration process by thoroughly inspecting on-premises SQL instances and deciding whether they are compatible with a new version of SQL Server in Azure, the Azure SQL Database service, or Azure SQL Managed Instances.
The DMA conducts a migration assessment to identify potential migration barriers as well as features that are partially or completely supported and may have an impact on the migration plan.
What is Azure Database Migration Service(DMS)?
Customers can use DMS to migrate workloads from various database source environments to Azure Data platform target services after DMA has completed the assessment.
Migrations can happen either offline or online. The application is unavailable while being migrated offline. During the period of adjustment to the new environment, online downtime is maintained to a minimum. Online migration is thought to be a preferable alternative because there is little downtime.
DMS now offers online migration of Azure DB for PostgreSQL Single Server Instances to a modified version of the service, in addition to migrating databases from on-premises and other clouds. The target environment can be either an Azure DB for PostgreSQL Single Server Instance or a Flexible Server.
SQL Server Migration Assistant(SSMA)
Customers who use several database platforms can transfer their data to SQL Server or Azure Synapse Analytics with SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA). The supported source systems include databases from Microsoft Access, MySQL, Oracle, SAP ASE, and DB2.
Azure Synapse Pathway
The challenge of porting existing SQL code to a new platform is one of the major challenges in upgrading a data warehouse. A database may contain thousands of lines of code that were written over many years, which means that translating it could be time- and resource-intensive. Azure Synapse Pathway, which makes it possible to move existing data warehouses to Azure Synapse Analytics through automatic code translation, addresses this problem.
Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) commands can be automatically converted into T-SQL-compliant language by Azure Synapse Pathway, making them compatible with Azure Synapse SQL as a target for migration. IBM Netezza, Microsoft SQL Server, and Snowflake are supported as source environments for the service, which is currently in preview.
Azure Backup and Site Recovery
Using Azure Backup, data can be backed up from a range of sources, including on-premises servers, Azure VMs, managed discs, Azure file shares, and more. You can utilize the service for data migration by restoring the backup data to the desired Azure environment.
Azure Backup includes application consistency for business applications like SQL Server, Exchange, and Sharepoint. Because of this consistency, a workable environment with the restored data may be deployed without incurring any additional costs.
A cloud-based disaster recovery method called Azure Site Recovery allows data replication from on-premises or other cloud environments to Azure.
Although the primary purpose of this service is to transform Azure into a disaster recovery site for your workloads, it may also be used to duplicate workloads and failover setups to Azure.
To ensure application integrity during failover, the service also leverages an application-consistent snapshot-based replication technique.
Final Words
Why should one Migrate to Azure?
Azure is a good platform for virtual machines, web servers, storage, and other integrated services. It is totally cloud-based as opposed to conventional on-premises infrastructure, which has advantages like quicker maintenance and only paying for what you need. A few additional factors that should influence your decision to choose Azure include security, gradual migration, reliability, and scalability.