BluePlan: A service for automated migration plan construction using AI

Abstract

Migration of legacy applications to Cloud has been growing steadily over the past years, driven by the promise of greater flexibility, scalability, and lower management costs. However, the complexity of the migration tasks and activities makes transformation of the current service and application architectures a long and difficult process that involves months of migration planning and execution. In this paper, we present a service application BluePlan and its implementation, which employs an artificial intelligence (AI) planner that optimizes the end-to-end migration planning with constraints, and creates migration plans for execution. The AI planner service serves to expedite and simplify the migration planning process by defining the clients’ constraints and resources in a simplified format that abstracts the user’s need to hardcode domains and problems. This capability is exposed as a service and evaluated for migration plans for over 500 hundred clients with varying independent memory, cpu and time constraints in the span of a few minutes, thereby enabling migration project manager and migration architects to reason about potential migration plans, and replan as needed.