I think the perspective is important here. From a user perspective, I think of it a lot like the 7.5 to 7.6, 7.6 to 7.6.1, etc. upgrades. There are user interface changes, new features and functionality, but mostly the same experience you're used to when you're talking Manage.
For the teams that are managing your Maximo install, it's a new product. New middleware dependencies (OpenShift and Mongo for everyone, potentially Kafka, DB2 Warehouse, Couchdb, etc. depending on additional products installed). There are many new containers that handle different components that an administrator at least needs a basic understanding of. The authentication flow for example has a container to render the login page, a container handling the authentication flow, a container handling the public MAS API (coreapi) to get details about your user, the internalapi pod (if you potentially have issues synchronizing to/from Manage to MAS), etc. There's a lot to learn even if you were extremely familiar with the previous Maximo architecture.
There are some really useful benefits to the new architecture, beyond the new product capabilities. Patching for some customers that didn't have proper tooling in place was a challenge with 7.6. Many times, if you ask a customer what changes they made to the install (java classes, XML changes, CSS, etc.) or inside WebSphere they wouldn't be able to tell you. MAS forces you to use customization archives, secrets, configmaps, etc. for tracking your configuration changes to intelligently layer them on top.
Instead of expecting customers to implement best practices (changing heap sizes, adding JVM arguments, configuring thread pools, etc.), MAS can build the image in the desired state automatically.
There are pros and cons with anything but it's overall a good change for the product.
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Steven Shull
Principal Maximo Solutions Engineer
Naviam
Cincinnati OH
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