Use cases for the migration toolkit for applications

• Use cases for MTA

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The migration toolkit for applications supports a variety of migration paths to ease the adoption of Red Hat® OpenShift® or Red Hat Application Foundations. By making this migration, organizations often benefit from increased operational efficiency and enhanced performance. While there are many different migration paths organizations can take, MTA offers a standardized approach to streamline the modernization journey. 

Common source platforms that organizations migrate to OpenShift from include Oracle WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere Application Server, JBoss EAP, Spring Boot, and essentially any Java™ application. For the purpose of this example, we will explore a typical Java application modernization journey with MTA.

Learn more about migration paths for MTA

Imagine a large financial services company that has been using a set of legacy Java applications to manage their policy administration and customer management systems. As part of their digital transformation strategy, they have decided to migrate their applications to a more modern and standardized platform, specifically Red Hat OpenShift, but they don’t know where to begin.

MTA has been designed to help organizations in this scenario, providing guidance on how to safely migrate and modernize their application portfolio to leverage OpenShift and other Red Hat technologies. 

There is a two pronged approach for MTA. On one hand, the toolkit provides as much insight as possible for the technical decision maker (architects leading the migration/modernization initiative) to make informed decisions. 

On the other hand, it provides guidance and some degree of automation for the developers performing the changes in the applications. The rationale behind this approach is to reduce risk as much as possible and make migration/modernization projects measurable and predictable, so organizations are able to allocate budget and resources to them.

Here's how the organization might use MTA to better inform their modernization journey:

1. Application inventory and rationalization: The organization begins by using the application inventory to evaluate their existing Java applications. Through the application inventory’s tagging model, the organization can classify their apps into different archetypes by leveraging curated tags related to application development such as programming languages, framework technologies, operating systems, or databases it consumes. This makes it easier for the organization to visualize their application portfolio’s current state and what needs to be done for a successful migration. 
    

   

2. Assessment and migration planning phase: Through an assessment module, the organization can evaluate their application portfolio to determine the suitability of containerization for their Java applications. The organization answers a questionnaire covering all essential topics related to different aspects of the application landscape, like architecture, technology stack, lifecycle management, licensing, hardware and business processes that might have an impact in how the application is managed. 
   
   Based on the responses, the tool detects that some of the organization’s payment applications rely on corporate libraries that incur certain cloud antipatterns and would require modifications to work seamlessly with OpenShift. With this information, the organization can easily assign priority, determine what applications need to migrate first based on recommendations and insight, and define the most suitable migration strategy for individual applications. 
    

   

3. Application analysis: To address the risks identified in the assessment module, the organization uses the Analysis module to run a portfolio-wide static code analysis. This analysis gives them more insights on the dependencies and technology stack of their applications, which helps identify potential issues that might prevent them from running on a target platform. It also helps them determine estimated migration effort for each application. With this, they can plan a scalable migration.
    

   

4. Documentation and best practices: Throughout the migration process, the organization refers to the documentation and best practices referenced by the toolkit on the issues detected during analysis. They receive guidance on containerization strategies, optimization techniques, and architectural considerations to ensure a smooth transition to Red Hat platforms.
5. Execution and support: With the support of Red Hat's consulting services and technical support, the organization executes the migration according to the plan. They monitor the progress closely, address any issues that arise during the migration process, and ensure that applications are successfully deployed and running on Red Hat OpenShift.

By leveraging MTA, the financial services company successfully modernizes their application infrastructure, benefiting from the reliability, scalability, and flexibility of OpenShift.