Monolithic to microservices: Refactor 700 apps in 12 months with Mirantis app migration and modernization services

In every industry, businesses are moving to containers and cloud native technologies to speed up their pace of innovation. It’s no easy feat, especially in traditional industries like financial services, retail, and manufacturing, where longstanding enterprises often run hundreds to thousands of monolithic applications accumulated over multiple decades. To help organizations simplify and speed up their transition to cloud native technologies, Mirantis is proud to offer innovative application migration and modernization services, which combine the power of AI-based automation tooling with Mirantis’ deep cloud native expertise to refactor Linux, Windows or AIX applications 600% faster than manual application modernization methods. 

We deliver to you a complete catalog of all your applications, mapped according to conversion difficulty; automated containerization and Kubernetes manifest generation; and expert guidance along the way to assist with application prioritization, migration strategy, as well as greenfield and brownfield development services for applications that need to be refactored.  

Let's look at what's involved, and how we can help you make the move.

At the heart of our application migration and modernization services is our state-of-the-art Mirantis Application Migration and Modernization Platform (AMMP), which uses pattern matching and machine learning technologies to efficiently discover and probe applications at scale, quickly containerize workloads, and rapidly deploy them onto any container or Kubernetes platform on any infrastructure. For an enterprise with 700 legacy applications, this means 20,000+ human hours saved and workload modernization completed in only 12 months instead of the average of 2.5 years using manual methods.

Our Service experts leverage the AMMP, a lightweight, agent-less platform and does not require access to source code to discover and assess your workloads.The only requirement for AMMP is appropriate network access to your applications, preferably in a non-production environment. We can set up the platform in any air-gapped environment as a docker container based appliance, a virtual machine appliance, or as an operator running on Kubernetes. Alternatively, for the least installation and management overhead, AMMP can be leveraged as a SaaS over a publicly hosted web portal.

Migrating and modernizing a massive number of monolithic applications can be overwhelming, and many enterprises struggle just to get started. What are all the applications running in the organization? How cloud native are they? How do you decide which apps to refactor? Which technology should you use? What are the risks? By engaging with Mirantis, the AMMP eliminates uncertainty and conquers analysis paralysis by creating both summarized and detailed reports during the initial workload discovery and assessment phases. 

Large enterprises often aren’t even aware of all the applications they’re running, never mind the complex interactions between them. AMMP uses secure and non-intrusive automation to rapidly deliver an X-Ray report that includes a comprehensive catalog of your applications, along with a deep dive assessment of each workload. Each deep dive provides a cloud native score for the application and reports over a dozen attributes, including process dependencies, environmental variables, start command(s), incoming and outgoing network connections, and more. For attributes that require special attention for containerization (for example, 32-bit processes or hard-coded network dependencies), the X-ray report provides recommended actions and the level of effort required. Additionally, the X-Ray delivers hub-and-spoke diagrams of applications running on each server, so business owners can see at a glance which applications interact with each other. 

Automating the workload discovery and assessment means that your technical staff don’t need to spend time tediously researching all the information and filling out lengthy spreadsheets, which can take several days for a single app. With automation, the steps can be completed much faster, more consistently, and with a higher likelihood of success. 

Not all applications require the same level of effort to modernize, depending on factors such as whether they’re stateful or stateless, standalone or clustered, and so on. During the assessment phase, AMMP also generates an Application Migration Map that provides an overview of all your applications and compares them in terms of how easy or difficult they would be to modernize

When the catalog, deep-dive assessment, and Application Migration Map are ready, Mirantis cloud native experts will review them with your application owners to prioritize workloads for modernization based on both technical and business considerations, and provide guidance on the appropriate migration strategy for different types of workloads. We’ll help sort your legacy applications into different buckets based on whether they’re best suited for refactoring, rewriting, rehosting, or replatforming, and provide a recommendation report.

During the transformation stage, AMMP automates the process of converting legacy applications into containers and microservices. With the click of a button, AMMP automatically generates a Dockerfile and base images.

AMMP can automatically containerize a broad range of Linux, Windows, and AIX applications, please contact us for the supported application versions, but here is a basic list:

• Java middleware: WebSphere, Weblogic, JBoss EAP, Tomcat, WildFly, SAP

• Windows stack: IIS Server, .NET, ASP.NET, .NETcore, Java

• Other stack: C and C++ binary, bash and shell scripts, Golang, Python, NGINX, Apache HTTP, Node.js, PHP-FPM Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, GNU libc

For applications that need to be rewritten or refactored, Mirantis offers greenfield and brownfield development through our Dev Acceleration services, including for MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Cassandra databases.

After containerization, Mirantis cloud native experts harden your application, developing a golden image for improved security. We’ll run the golden image through validation, testing, security scanning, and risk assessments to verify functionality, governance, and compliance and ensure no vulnerabilities are present, before pushing it into a Docker compliant registry, such as Mirantis Secure Registry.

AMMP automatically generates Kubernetes manifests for your applications. We can distribute containers into groups and standardize Helm charts to streamline the entire process of migration systematically. If needed, the application blueprint can incorporate corporate standards required by your organization, such as for tagging, allowable namespaces, pod security policies, resource quotas, and so on.

After the blueprint is ready, AMMP automatically deploys the application into your target development and QA Kubernetes clusters using CI/CD. Your QA team can then validate functionality and performance before signing off for each application’s promotion into production. We use automated continuous transformation pipelines to establish a repeatable factory model for delivering containerized applications to Kubernetes clusters, and our cloud native experts can help you set up your CI/CD pipelines, adopt Kubernetes best practices, and incorporate service mesh, Ingress controller, or other components.

Many organizations have strategic initiatives this year to migrate and modernize their applications, but struggle with the complexity and scale of the task. With Mirantis application migration and modernization services, we can help your company migrate and modernize your legacy applications 600% faster than with manual methods, saving thousands of human hours.

If you’d like to learn more about our services or see a demo of Mirantis Application Migration and Modernization Platform, please contact us.