AWS Migration Hub
A dashboard service that centrally tracks and visualizes progress across multiple migration tools, also offering Strategy Recommendations for migration strategy evaluation and Refactor Spaces for refactoring support
Overview
AWS Migration Hub is a service for centrally planning and tracking workload migrations from on-premises to AWS. It visualizes progress from AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), and third-party migration tools on a single dashboard, providing a complete picture of server migration projects at scale. The Strategy Recommendations feature evaluates optimal migration strategies (rehost, replatform, refactor) per workload, while Refactor Spaces supports incremental refactoring to microservices.
Why Migration Projects Become Chaotic and the Value of Centralized Tracking
In large-scale migration projects, tracking which workload is at which stage becomes inherently difficult when migrating dozens to hundreds of servers and databases in parallel. It is common to use different tools for different workload types - MGN for lift-and-shift, DMS for database migration, and App2Container for containerization. Since each tool displays progress in its own console, project managers had to piece together the overall picture by switching between multiple screens. Migration Hub solves this problem by aggregating progress from all migration tools into a single dashboard. It displays each application's migration status (Not Started, In Progress, Complete, Failed) in real time, and allows grouping dependent servers by application for management. Migration Hub itself incurs no additional charges - you only pay for the migration tools you use, lowering the adoption barrier. Azure also offers Azure Migrate as an equivalent service with Assessment tools and Server Migration, but Migration Hub provides deeper integration with AWS-specific migration tools like DMS and MGN, delivering a consistent workflow for AWS-targeted migrations.
Quantitatively Evaluating Migration Strategies with Strategy Recommendations
The most important and difficult decision in the early stages of a migration project is choosing whether to rehost (migrate as-is), replatform (migrate with partial optimization), or refactor (redesign as cloud-native) for each workload. Strategy Recommendations analyzes information collected by a data collector installed on-premises - server specs, OS versions, running processes, and network dependencies - and presents recommended strategies for each workload. For example, for a Windows application running on .NET Framework 4.x, it presents both EC2 rehosting and Elastic Beanstalk replatforming as candidates, allowing comparison of compatibility risks and estimated costs. For databases, it evaluates whether migration to RDS is appropriate or whether Aurora migration could yield performance improvements. Based on these quantitative evaluation results, you can plan migration prioritization and resource allocation, avoiding the easy but suboptimal decision of rehosting everything and instead selecting the optimal strategy per workload. Cloud migration books on Amazon systematically cover migration strategy selection frameworks.
Incremental Modernization with Refactor Spaces and DMS/MGN Integration
Refactor Spaces provides an environment for incrementally refactoring monolithic applications into microservices. It automatically builds infrastructure implementing the Strangler Fig pattern, allowing the existing monolith and new microservices to coexist while gradually shifting traffic to the new services. Internally, it auto-generates a routing layer combining API Gateway and Network Load Balancer, controlling request routing by URL path. For example, you can route /api/orders to a new Lambda-based microservice while routing everything else to the existing monolith - all without code changes. DMS handles database migration and replication, maintaining continuous data synchronization from on-premises Oracle or SQL Server to Aurora or DynamoDB. MGN handles server rehosting, minimizing downtime with agent-based block-level replication. Progress from all these tools is aggregated on the Migration Hub dashboard, enabling you to drive the project while maintaining cross-cutting visibility into microservices being refactored, databases being migrated, and servers being rehosted.