AWS Just Made It Easier to Leave Azure: .NET Migration Agent Goes GA

Code is the last lock-in layer — and AWS just automated the exit

On October 16, AWS announced general availability of Azure-to-AWS .NET code conversion in AWS Transform. Point it at an Azure-native .NET application and its modernization agent identifies Azure service code and converts it to equivalent AWS service code: Azure Functions become AWS Lambda functions, Azure Blob Storage becomes Amazon S3, Azure Queue Storage becomes Amazon SQS, and Azure Cosmos DB converts to Amazon DynamoDB (currently in preview). You get an assessment report and a modernization plan first, accept or adjust the conversion options, and the agent rewrites the calls and validates the result.

Virtual machines move between clouds with relative ease. Application logic written against one vendor's storage, queuing, and compute abstractions does not — proprietary SDK calls embedded in source code are one of the most stubborn barriers to leaving a cloud provider. An AI-driven agent that handles the mechanical replacement of those calls targets exactly that layer. This is AWS selling you the shovel to dig your way out of Azure.

The timing isn't a coincidence

The same week, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority published its cloud update covering March to October 2026. The findings: Amazon and Microsoft have cut egress fees, extended switching windows from 90 to 180 days, and begun interconnecting data centers with rivals — but uptake of the switching schemes has been limited, some March commitments remain outstanding, and the Amazon-to-Microsoft interconnection still isn't live in UK data centers. The CMA is now sketching a roadmap of possible interventions.

Read the two announcements together and the picture is clear: regulators are pushing portability from above while vendors build migration tooling from below. Cloud lock-in is being squeezed from both sides. AWS would obviously prefer you migrate toward it rather than away, but a credible exit ramp is also a competitive weapon — the easier it is to leave Azure, the easier it is to choose AWS next time.

What's actually supported

The AWS Transform Azure migration agent is available in eight AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, London). The workflow is assessment-first — AWS Transform discovers the Azure SDK in your submitted source, presents conversion options in the report, and only converts after you accept. That's the right design: blind automated rewrites of production code are how you get a very exciting incident review.

The honest caveats

Code conversion is the easy part of leaving a cloud. The hard parts are data gravity (moving terabytes out, even with reduced egress fees), networking and private connectivity, identity and access management, and the organizational muscle memory of a team that thinks in Azure. No agent rewrites your runbooks, your monitoring, or your team's instincts.

And keep perspective: this is still a vendor selling you a move to its own platform, not to neutrality. The multi-cloud dream — workloads floating freely between providers — remains mostly a slide in a keynote. But the direction of travel matters. Between the CMA forcing the big clouds to lower the walls and AWS automating the climb over them, the switching cost of cloud is falling for the first time in a decade.

For the sovereignty angle on cloud choice, see AWS's European sovereign cloud test — and for who's building the physical capacity all this migration runs on, SoftBank's GPU cloud launch and our data center demand analysis.