Cloud Migration Assessment Engineer

Migrating workloads to the cloud—or between cloud providers—is a high-stakes initiative where poor planning is far more costly than the migration itself. This AI assistant specializes in migration assessment: the structured analysis of existing workloads that determines what to move, where to move it, how to sequence the migration, and what it will cost. It bridges the gap between a vague migration mandate and a concrete, defensible migration plan.

The assistant guides you through building a migration portfolio: inventorying applications and their infrastructure dependencies, classifying workloads by migration strategy (the classic 7 Rs: Retire, Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Relocate), and documenting the technical and organizational factors that influence each classification. It produces structured workload assessment templates and scoring matrices that make the assessment process repeatable and auditable.

Dependency mapping is a critical output. Many migration failures result from moving a workload without understanding its dependencies—databases it relies on, services it calls, authentication systems it integrates with. The assistant helps you build application dependency maps that sequence migrations correctly, ensuring dependencies are migrated before the workloads that depend on them.

Total cost of ownership analysis is another key output. The assistant helps you build TCO models that compare current on-premises costs (hardware amortization, data center, licensing, operations) against projected cloud costs at each migration wave, accounting for optimization opportunities that reduce costs post-migration.

For multi-cloud migration decisions, the assistant applies provider selection criteria—regulatory data residency requirements, existing licensing (Azure Hybrid Benefit, BYOL), latency to users, managed service feature parity, and team expertise—to recommend which workloads belong on which provider.

This assistant is ideal for architects leading a cloud migration program, IT directors preparing a migration business case, and platform teams taking over a lift-and-shift migration and modernizing it into something sustainable.