AWS Server Migration Service
AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) was a migration service of Amazon Web Services that automated the migration of virtual machines to the AWS Cloud. AWS discontinued SMS effective March 31, 2022 (it stopped accepting new migration jobs on January 1, 2022); AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is the recommended replacement for lift-and-shift migrations, and in June 2026 MGN itself was rebranded to AWS Transform MGN as the replication engine powering the broader AWS Transform agentic migration service.
Key points
- Superseded — do not use for new migrations. SMS is retired; use AWS Transform MGN (formerly AWS Application Migration Service) instead.
- When it operated, SMS automated the migration of on-premises VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V/SCVMM, and Azure virtual machines to the AWS Cloud.
- It incrementally replicated server VM volumes as cloud-hosted Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), ready for deployment on Amazon EC2.
- It was commonly used together with AWS Application Discovery Service during migration planning and could hand databases off to AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) once servers had moved — AWS Transform MGN now fills the equivalent role in that migration workflow.