This topic describes the basic information about Cloud Migration Hub (CMH), including the service definition, workflow, benefits, key features, and scenarios.
Overview
CMH is a one-stop migration platform developed by Alibaba Cloud. CMH provides automated and intelligent system surveys, cloud planning, and migration management to help you simplify and accelerate cloud transformation. The capabilities of CMH allow you to manage migration in a business-oriented manner throughout the full lifecycle.
Benefits
Adaptation to various sources
CMH adapts to a variety of common IT infrastructures, such as a general data center, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Tencent Cloud. The Alibaba Cloud migration team designs specific collectors to survey resources in different environments. The collectors collect resource information such as networking, hostnames, processes, topologies, and performance. The collected information is used for subsequent analysis and planning of migrations.
High data security
To meet different requirements on data security and auditing, CMH not only supports automatic import of collected data but also allows you to export collected data, check the data, and then import the data. In addition, CMH provides full-process encryption for all of your IT resource information. The IT resource information is encrypted by using Key Management Service (KMS) before it is stored on disks. This ensures high data security. The IT resource information includes all the information collected by CMH and all the information that you import, such as IP addresses, hostnames, processes, monitoring data, and networking.
Full lifecycle management
CMH provides migration plan templates that are generated based on best practices. You can create migration plans by using the migration plan templates for different migration scenarios. CMH also provides a variety of end-to-end tools to help you survey resources, map service specifications, create resources, create migration tasks, schedule tasks, and monitor migration status on a dashboard. The migration plan feature of CMH helps you manage the full lifecycle of migration tasks.
Ease of use and high efficiency
CMH provides one-stop migration and integration capabilities to improve cloud transformation efficiency for you. CMH integrates with multiple Alibaba Cloud migration services and allows you to manage these services in a centralized manner. CMH also provides the batch assistant feature to help you quickly and flexibly initiate migration tasks. In addition, the built-in lightweight Dispatch Center of CMH allows you to schedule a large number of migration tasks in batches within specified time periods by creating scheduling groups.
Features
TCO analysis
CMH provides the total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis feature. You can use this feature to estimate the migration costs for your enterprises regardless of whether you migrate data from third-party cloud services or self-managed data centers to Alibaba Cloud. You can view the Alibaba Cloud services that need to be purchased for the migration and cost comparisons. This helps you make decisions on cloud transformation.
Billing analysis for third-party cloud services
You can assign an account that has read-only permissions on a third-party cloud to CMH. Then, CMH automatically performs billing analysis and mapping between the third-party cloud services and Alibaba Cloud services, and provides a comparison between the costs of using third-party services and the estimated costs of using Alibaba Cloud services.
Cost analysis for data migration from data centers
CMH identifies resources in your data centers by using non-intrusive collection tools, generates cloud resource lists, and estimates the costs for the migration of these resources. In addition, CMH provides a comparison between the costs of using self-managed data centers and the estimated costs of using Alibaba Cloud services in your region.
The estimation result displayed in the preceding figure is calculated by using the TCO estimation feature.
Comprehensive system survey
CMH provides diverse system survey capabilities to support data migration from third-party clouds or self-managed data centers to Alibaba Cloud. CMH provides application topologies to help you create migration plans.
Resource survey in third-party cloud environments
You can assign an account that has read-only permissions on a third-party cloud to CMH. Then, CMH automatically collects various types of resource information, such as resource names, types, specifications, performance, and networking. This paves the way for the subsequent migration analysis. To meet different requirements on data security and auditing, CMH provides two modes for you to survey resources in a third-party cloud: online and offline.
The preceding figure shows the surveyed AWS resources.
The preceding figure shows the details of an AWS resource.
Non-intrusive survey on resources in on-premises environments
To survey resources in an on-premises environment in a remote and non-intrusive manner, you can use SSH to connect to the on-premises environment and collect various types of resource information. The information includes hostnames, IP addresses, specifications, processes, performance, and networking. This paves the way for the subsequent migration analysis. To meet different requirements on data security and auditing, CMH provides two modes for you to conduct a non-intrusive survey on resources in an on-premises environment: online and offline.
The preceding figure shows an HTML page that is generated to display the specifications of the resources in an on-premises environment.
The preceding figure shows an HTML page that is generated to display the topology for the resources in an on-premises environment.
Business analysis and display
CMH allows you to analyze and categorize business application systems in a visualized manner, and provides a one-stop dashboard to manage the migration progress.
Topologies
To help you better classify your application clusters, CMH provides architecture diagrams to show the dependencies among components in the applications based on the analysis and identification results of surveys.
The preceding figure shows a topology that is generated after the survey result of specific resources is imported.
Dashboard
CMH provides a dedicated dashboard for you to view the migration progress of your business. This allows you to monitor all migration tasks in a one-stop manner.
The preceding figure shows the overall dashboard that displays the migration progress of each migration group.
Migration plan templates
CMH provides built-in migration plan templates that are generated based on best practices. You can create migration plans that are suitable for different migration scenarios and obtain the resource specifications and migration tools recommended by CMH.
Infrastructure as code
To help you efficiently manage infrastructures in a visual manner, CMH intelligently maps source instances to Alibaba Cloud services of specified specifications based on the scenario of a migration plan. In addition, CMH automatically generates executable Terraform code for batch resource management.
Solution and tool recommendation
To facilitate migration, CMH provides preset migration tools and solutions that are suitable for scenarios of different migration plans. In addition, CMH allows you to initiate migration tasks in batches based on mappings between source and destination resources.
The preceding figure shows a list of migration tasks synchronized from specific services within your Alibaba Cloud account.
Improved migration efficiency
CMH is designed for you to migrate all your resources to Alibaba Cloud in batches. CMH provides a series of components to improve migration efficiency and stability.
Batch assistant
To help you initiate migration tasks in a quicker and more flexible manner, CMH provides the batch assistant feature to allow you to create multiple migration tasks at a time by configuring parameters on the web page or uploading templates. This greatly reduces repeated manual operations.
Dispatch Center
To resolve issues such as insufficient migration bandwidth and overload on source resources during batch migration, CMH provides the Dispatch Center feature to allow you to create scheduling groups, specify scheduling time periods, and customize scheduling rules. This way, you can manage concurrent migration tasks in a centralized manner.
The preceding figure shows the scheduling groups that are enabled in Dispatch Center.
Scenarios
Migration caused by the replacement of cloud service providers
You may want to migrate part of or all of your resources from a third-party cloud service provider to Alibaba Cloud if the cloud service provider cannot meet your requirements, or you may consider multi-cloud deployment. CMH supports automated surveys on resources in third-party clouds and can help you build migration plans. In addition, CMH synchronizes the status of migration tasks that you create by using migration tools provided by Alibaba Cloud. This way, you can check the status of migration tasks in a centralized manner.
Cloud migration for traditional enterprises
Traditional enterprises usually have multiple application systems and closely coupled applications. The application systems are usually managed by different departments. In addition, traditional enterprises usually have high requirements for data security and auditing. CMH provides different types of survey methods that cover most IT infrastructures and allows you to export audit data. You can also further design the architecture of your business on Alibaba Cloud based on the survey results. CMH allows you to check the status of migration tasks in a centralized manner.
Big data migration to cloud and data mid-end building
You may want to migrate on-premises data to Alibaba Cloud to build cloud-based data warehouses and data mid-ends. CMH provides tools to help you quickly create tasks to migrate a large amount of data. These tools help you survey your on-premises resources, perform model-based analysis, configure multiple migration tasks at a time, and manage migration tasks in a centralized manner. This way, your data can be migrated to Alibaba Cloud in a secure, efficient, and visualized manner.
Data migration for disaster recovery and data center building
To meet the requirements for disaster recovery based on multiple data centers, you may want to replicate some data from a data center to a new data center to implement disaster recovery. CMH can discover the resources at your source data center in an efficient manner and provide business-oriented solutions for migration and synchronization between the two data centers. This way, you can build a data center in an efficient, fast, manageable, and monitorable manner.