---
title: Migrate to ILM
description: You may already be another mechanism to manage the lifecycle of your indices. To help you adapt your existing indices to use index lifecycle management,...
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4236/manage-data/lifecycle/index-lifecycle-management/migrate-ilm
products:
  - Elastic Cloud Enterprise
  - Elastic Cloud Hosted
  - Elasticsearch
---

# Migrate to ILM
You may already be another mechanism to manage the lifecycle of your indices. To help you adapt your existing indices to use index lifecycle management, a few guides are available:
<definitions>
  <definition term="Migrate to ILM on Elastic Cloud Hosted or Elastic Cloud Enterprise deployments ess: ece:">
    Describes how to migrate Elasticsearch indices in an Elastic Cloud Hosted or Elastic Cloud Enterprise deployment from using deprecated index curation or another periodic indices management mechanism to use index lifecycle management.
  </definition>
  <definition term="Migrate to ILM on self-managed and Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes deployments  self: eck:">
    Describes how to migrate Elasticsearch indices in a self-managed environment from using deprecated index curation, or any other lifecycle mechanism, to use index lifecycle management.
  </definition>
  <definition term="Migrate index allocation filters to node roles stack:">
    Describes how to migrate from using custom node attributes and attribute-based allocation filters to using built-in node roles, enabling ILM to automatically move indices between data tiers.
  </definition>
</definitions>

If you are configuring ILM for new indices, refer to [Configure a lifecycle policy](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4236/manage-data/lifecycle/index-lifecycle-management/configure-lifecycle-policy). If you plan to manually apply an index lifecycle management policy to existing indices that are not already using another type of lifecycle management, refer to [Manually apply a lifecycle policy to an index](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4236/manage-data/lifecycle/index-lifecycle-management/policy-apply).