The day after 'S3izure', does anyone feel like moving to the cloud?

Anyone? Bueller? Asking because Microsoft, Google, have just offered free migration tools

Today might not be the best day to contemplate migrating to the cloud, given that yesterday's epic Amazon Web Services outage. But that hasn't stopped Google and Microsoft from issuing new offers to help you take on-premises workloads into their clouds.

Google first: it's done a deal with an outfit called Cloud Endure that offers live migration of VMs to the cloud. The Alphabet subsidiary now offers Cloud Endure's VM migration service at the low, low, price of $0.00. The offer covers Windows or Linux servers.

You'll pay once those servers land in the G-cloud – there's no such thing as free lunch, or free storage and compute – and Google says you may also see charges for “ephemeral helper instances that orchestrate the migration.”

Google's will happily have you move those VMs into its tender care for production purposes, but is realistic enough to note that the cloud is a fine place to locate a disaster recovery rig.

Microsoft cottoned on to that ages ago when it created Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and made it capable of sucking vSphere-tended VMs into Azure. Now Redmond's again signalled it wants VMware workloads in its cloud by announcing a new Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner that “understand their on-premises networking requirements, Microsoft Azure compute and storage requirements for successful ASR replication, and test failover or failover of their applications.”

Or in other words, the tool makes it easier than ever to plot a VMware-to-ASR migration. The service is a preview for now, but also a preview of Microsoft's increasing aggressing towards Virtzilla.

Good job VMware just fired up its own cloud DR then, isn't it?

If you are bold enough to talk about these tools around the office today, or even raise the topic of cloud migration at all, let us know how your ideas are received. ®