Offload workloads to the cloud. Improve your devOps and speed-to-market. Tap into the consistency and reliability of containers.
These are the main drivers behind the revolution known as application modernization. But how do you get there? Where do you even start? How can IBM help?
Transformation Advisor
The journey to the cloud starts by evaluating your on-premises application portfolio with Transformation Advisor - which provides a visual report of each application’s ability to move into a cloud-native environment. Since most customers have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications, this initial assessment is crucial for understanding the in-house portfolio and categorize it into different paths, such as lift-and-shift, refactor and rebuild.
Check out this recipe for step-by-step instructions on how to use Transformation Advisor!
IBM Cloud Paks
The "golden" path of modernization, where you will gain the most benefits, is to run your application in a WebSphere Liberty Docker container with a container orchestrator framework such as Kubernetes.
WebSphere Liberty, a leading application server based on Open Liberty that fully supports MicroProfile and Spring, has had a presence on Docker Hub for years. In fact, you can transform an Open Liberty Dockerfile into a WebSphere Liberty Dockerfile by changing a single word ( FROM open-liberty → FROM websphere-liberty)!
Earlier in 2018, WebSphere Liberty also attained the status of Docker Store Certified—a title reserved for the top enterprise containers that follow industry’s best practices and pass a rigid vulnerability scan.
However, when running Docker containers in an orchestration environment such as Kubernetes, you also need a set of related artifacts—ingress setup, horizontal auto-scaling policies, persistent transactions, dynamically mounted configuration, logging/metrics dashboards, session caching, node affinity rules, etc. You also need these artifacts to be easily configurable, shareable, and deployable.
Enter IBM’s WebSphere Liberty Cloud Pak—a set of pre-packaged enterprise capabilities for deployment, lifecycle management, and production use cases, deployable to IBM Cloud Private or IBM Cloud Private + OpenShift (with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system)! We refer to this path as Application Modernization.
But what if you can’t yet afford to rebuild your applications into a modern, built-for-the-cloud application server such as WebSphere Liberty? You can still be cloud-enabled and embark in the journey to containers with the new WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Cloud Pak! We refer to this path as Operational Modernization.
Microclimate
The journey to the cloud includes modernizing your devOps pipeline as well! This is where IBM's Microclimate comes in - providing an end-to-end, cloud-native solution for creating, building, testing and deploying applications. Built upon Jenkins, this platform allows for iterative development from multiple teams and focuses on providing the best user experience when deploying containers into IBM Cloud!
WebSphere App Server for IBM Cloud Private VM Quickstarter
For the workloads that are not yet ready for containers, IBM has created a provisioning service called (in short) WAS for ICP VM Quickstarter! It’s a rapid way to migrate your traditional WebSphere app to an up-to-date WAS V9 integrated with IBM Cloud Private Core Operational Services. This mean you can have your complex applications, completely unchanged, running in the cloud alongside your cloud-enabled apps that are running in Kubernetes!
You will no longer have to deal with manual installation and setup of WAS topologies - you just pick your environment and press a button to spawn it! This makes the VM Quickstarter also a perfect place for testing new versions prior to an upgrade.
Check out the details in this article.
Join Us For Our Webinar, January, 29, 2019!
In this session Alan Little and I will answer these questions by demonstrating the curated patterns and tools that IBM has available to ensure your company is successfully in this journey. We’ll cover the end-to-end lifecycle of modernization, including operational and application updates.
You’ll learn about the extensive suite of solutions available, including: Transformation Advisor, Microclimate, IBM Cloud (public and private), IBM VM Quickstarter and IBM Cloud Paks!
When combined, these solutions are able to tackle your entire portfolio of applications, including green field cloud-native apps! Come chat with us about this exciting journey.
Click here to register!