Migrating to AWS

Moving an estate to AWS breaks down into four separable decisions: what to do with each application, how to move the servers, how to move the data, and what stays on-premises permanently. This section is arranged along those lines.

Start with the seven migration strategies, which is the vocabulary the rest of the section assumes. Server and application moves are covered under application migration; databases, file shares and object stores under data migration; and the on-premises appliance that keeps local applications talking to S3 after the migration under Storage Gateway.

What changed in 2025

AWS closed several long-standing migration services to new customers on 7 November 2025: AWS Migration Hub, AWS Application Discovery Service and the AWS Snow Family. Existing customers can finish their in-flight projects; new accounts cannot start one. The replacements are AWS Transform for discovery, planning and tracking, and AWS DataSync or AWS Data Transfer Terminal for bulk data movement.

Pages that describe a closed service say so at the top and name what replaces it, because a reader arriving from an old runbook or an outdated tutorial needs to learn that the service is gone, not find nothing at all.