Understanding migration options

When migrating applications, we have different options for virtual machines (VMs) and for data. We must also choose how much work we want to perform modernizing the application before we move it. At a high level, our choices include the following:

• Lift and shift/Rehost—Leave the application architecture as-is by simply replicating the VM into Azure. This takes a complete copy of the VM—OS, application, configurations, and data.
• Refactor—Refactoring involves re-deploying your solution with minimal (if any) code changes but to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) components—for example, deploying a .NET app onto an Azure web app instead of a VM or a database to Azure SQL instead of SQL on a VM (if it supports it).
• Re-architect—Take refactoring to the next level by making code changes that will enable you to leverage other cloud services. This might involve breaking up a monolithic application to use microservices...