Red Hat Focuses Konveyor Efforts for Kubernetes on App Modernization
Red Hat has revamped the open source Konveyor project it launched in collaboration with IBM to focus more specifically on tools and processes that enable existing legacy Java applications to run on Kubernetes clusters.
Previously, Konveyer was an effort to aggregate the development of multiple open source projects that are now being advanced independently of each other.
Ramon Roman Nissen, a senior product manager for Red Hat, says a tool previously known as Tackle has become Konveyor, and the capabilities of a companion Move2Kube project is being integrated into a Konveyor project that is a sandbox level project being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). A Konveyor operator has also been made available for upstream Kubernetes distributions, with an instance designed specifically for the Red Hat OpenShift distribution of Kubernetes coming this month.
The overall goal is to make it simpler for organizations to modernize legacy applications by either re-platforming them as they are or refactoring them in a way that transforms them into cloud-native applications based on microservices constructed using containers, he says.
In general, IT teams are employing two approaches to modernizing legacy applications. Some organizations are taking advantage of tools such as kubevirt to enable virtual machines to be encapsulated in a container that runs on Kubernetes. Others are refactoring their applications to create a set of microservices based on containers before deploying that application on a Kubernetes cluster. Some organizations are using a combination of both approaches depending on how mission-critical the application is.
Regardless of approach, Red Hat is attempting to provide a set of tools that will enable organizations to pursue either strategy as they see fit, says Roman Nissen. Red Hat, for example, makes available a Migration Toolkit for Applications 6.0 toolkit based on Konveyor.
After experiencing something akin to a mid-life crisis, Java has itself been modernized as the Java community adopts many concepts that were pioneered in other programming languages. Regardless of whether organizations are modernizing existing Java applications or writing new ones, it doesn’t appear that the venerable programming language will disappear any time soon. The challenge now is ensuring Java applications can run optimally on Kubernetes clusters.
Of course, not every application is fit for Kubernetes purpose, so some care needs to be taken before deciding to migrate an application. In the cloud-native era, organizations have many options, but the more an application needs to run at scale in a distributed computing environment, the more it tends to lend itself to being deployed on Kubernetes. Deploying an application on Kubernetes simply as a means of padding a resume is not advisable given the level of expertise required to maintain it.
In general, IT teams would be well-advised to get external help any time they need to migrate an application. After all, migrating applications is not an activity that most IT teams regularly engage in and the chances that something is likely to go wrong are not insubstantial.
