Tools and techniques for migrating applications to compute clouds are described herein. A tool may be used to migrate any arbitrary application to a specific implementation of a compute cloud. The tool may use a library of migration rules, apply the rules to a selected application, and in the process generate migration output. The migration output may be advisory information, revised code, patches, or the like. There may be different sets of rules for different cloud compute platforms, allowing the application to be migrated to different clouds. The rules may describe a wide range of application features and corresponding corrective actions for migrating the application. Rules may specify semantic behavior of the application, code or calls, storage, database instances, interactions with databases, operating systems hosting the application, and others.