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# Migration Center

## 1. What it is

> "A unified platform that helps you accelerate your end-to-end cloud journey from your current on-premises or
> other cloud environments to Google Cloud."

**"Or other cloud environments" is the clause that matters here.** This is not an on-premises-only tool, which
makes it the first-party starting point for exactly the cross-cloud work this hub's parity guides serve.

## 2. Three ways to get assets in

| Method | When |
|---|---|
| **discovery client** installed | continuous, detailed collection including performance metrics |
| **manual upload** | you already have an inventory from somewhere else |
| **agentless scanning** via CLI tools | a **one-time export**, when you cannot install anything |

The agentless path is the one that unblocks an assessment in a political environment: no agent, no change
window, one export.

## 3. What it does

- **cost estimation**, in two depths: **rapid estimates** and **detailed assessments**;
- **asset discovery and inventory**;
- **infrastructure assessment** with **technical fit analysis**;
- **total cost of ownership (TCO) reporting**;
- **network dependency identification**;
- **grouping** of assets, and **migration preference** configuration;
- **migration wave planning** with **risk assessment**.

## 4. The outputs, and which of them an estimate consumes

| Output | What an estimate does with it |
|---|---|
| **asset inventory with performance metrics** | the sizing input. **This is the one that matters most** — it is measured utilisation rather than provisioned capacity, which is how right-sizing stops being a guess |
| **cloud cost projections** and **TCO reports** | the cost line, under preference sets you chose |
| **network dependency visualisations** | the **wave** boundaries. Two systems that talk to each other move together, or you pay for the traffic between them crossing clouds mid-migration |
| **risk assessments with mitigation strategies** | the contingency |
| **product recommendations** | a starting mapping, to be checked against the parity guides |
| **groups** and **preference sets** | the model you re-run the assessment under |

**Network dependencies are the most under-used output.** A wave plan built from application ownership rather
than from measured traffic is the commonest reason a migration incurs unplanned egress — which is frequently
the single largest unexpected cost in the whole project
(`guides/parity-and-migration-method.md`).

## 5. How to use it with this hub

Migration Center answers **"what have I got, and roughly what will it cost on Google Cloud"**. It does not
answer **"what changes, and what work does that imply"** — that is what the ten parity guides are for.

The intended sequence, set out in full in `guides/parity-and-migration-method.md`:

1. **inventory and measure** — Migration Center, or the source cloud's equivalent;
2. **map** — the parity guide per family, for counterpart names;
3. **price the differences** — the estimate-bearing rows in each parity guide;
4. **sequence** — waves from the network dependency graph;
5. **move** — the migration family's execution services
   (`reference/migration/migrate-to-virtual-machines.md`,
   `reference/migration/database-migration-service.md`,
   `reference/migration/storage-transfer-service.md`).

A **rapid estimate** is enough for step 3's first pass; a **detailed assessment** is what you want before
committing to a number anybody will be held to.


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