Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of integrated solutions spanning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), on-premises datacenters, and hybrid environments with support for both Windows and Linux. Harnessing this platform has never been easier with the robust migration capabilities of Azure Site Recovery.

Azure is the only public cloud today that seamlessly connects your on-premises data center to the cloud. Azure’s robust capabilities, first class services and integrated tools help you attain new levels of scale and elasticity. Azure has no steep learning curve, so your organization can be productive from day one as you simply use what you already know. If you want to achieve a true hybrid cloud platform, with a seamless integration between your existing on-premises assets and the power of Azure, but feel locked in another public cloud such as AWS, take advantage of Azure Site Recovery's recently announced migration capabilities. Site Recovery is also available as part of the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) and is free to try, or leverage for migrations for the first 31 days.

The following video demonstrates how a simple application can be migrated in a matter of hours from AWS to Azure.
 

The video illustrates the four simple steps required to migrate your applications from AWS to Azure. They are:

1. Prepare Azure Resources

   In order to prepare for your applications to be migrated into Azure, you need to set up infrastructure components on Azure. You’ll begin with a Site Recovery vault, as this will be the starting point for all of your ASR experiences. Follow the instructions in the Quick Start Wizard to deploy two IaaS VMs viz., configuration server and master target server in Azure. You can follow instructions on setting up protection between on-premises physical servers and Azure to deploy these components on Azure.

2. Prepare AWS resources

   You need to deploy an EC2 instance running the process server component. Keep the guidelines on sizing of the process server in mind when you deploy the process server. The process server needs access to the VMs running your application on AWS which is why it’s recommended that the process server be in the same subnet as the VMs you are migrating. The VMs you are migrating will also need to have security group configuration that allows inbound connections on TCP and UDP ports 135-139, 445 and 1024-65535 to enable communication with the process server. Once you’ve completed this step and registered your process server with the configurations server, you are ready to move to the next step.

3. Discover and “protect” AWS VMs in Azure

   At this point, you can begin discovering your VMs on AWS. Start by creating a protection group and use the “add physical machine” workflow to identify all the EC2 instances that you wish to migrate to Azure. You can use the private IP address of the EC2 instance to discover them, you are also afforded the convenience of having a friendly name that you can refer to later. After this step is complete, all the VMs you identified in the previous step will begin to replicate to Azure. This can be a long running operation depending on the size of the virtual machines, the network capacity and the process server. Once this initial replication is successful you are ready for migration.

4. Migrate your application with one-click!

   At this point you perform an failover action with one-click and migrate your application to Azure. Be sure to delete your EC2 instances and disable protection on ASR since these resources are no longer needed.

Now that you've learnt how easy it is to migrate your applications, do try for yourself and take advantage of the truly hybrid hyper-scale public cloud that is Azure. Getting started with Azure Site Recovery is easy and as noted earlier is free to leverage for migrations for the first 31 days. Azure documentation on Migrating Windows virtual machines from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Azure is available to guide you through this simple process.