To containerize or not — that is the question

Google Cloud brings you a free tool to determine how ‘fit’ your application is, to move to containers.

Containers | Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

Microservices are smaller & simpler services leading to faster innovation, better products. And a lot other cool things!
Despite knowing the benefits, sometimes it can be difficult to decide if you are ready to containerize your applications. And if yes, how do you go about it? Will you need to write things from scratch? Can little-to-no refactoring itself do the job? These questions can have subjective answers and one might end up contemplating the decision for long.

If you don’t want to procrastinate like me, you can simply use the ‘Modernisation fit’ tool provided by Google Cloud. The tool generates a report which — as the name suggests — determines how ready your application is for moving to a modern platform. Based on the results you can decide whether you can move with little-to-no change, should you refactor, or completely re-write it. This is a quick, free and objective way.

In this blog we will see how to use this tool for an application running on a virtual machine to check if we should move it to containers running on GKE.

The generated assessment report describes any issues that must be resolved before migration, and an overall fit assessment of either:

• Excellent fit.
• Good fit, with some findings that might require attention.
• Needs minimal work before migrating.
• Needs moderate work before migrating.
• Needs major work before migrating.
• No fit.
• Insufficient data.

If you are curious how the tool determines the fit, check out this doc.

So, how to use it?

Overview | Image by Author

Generating readable report —

Search for Anthos in the GCP console search bar and go to the Migrate to Containers section.

Anthos > Migrate to containers | Screenshot by Author

Click on ‘Open fit assessment report’. It will ask for a json file. Browse through downloaded files and upload the file that you had downloaded from cloudshell, app-mfit-report.json in my case. A new screen appears and a report is generated under ‘My reports > Assessed VMs’ section.

Upload the json, click on report name and read through details! | GIF by author arpana_naa 👩🏻‍💻

Click on the name of the report to view it. Read through the details. You can see the application judges what is a good fit or not, and suggests changes required as well.
This is a free tool, so you can try it out even if you are curious to see the report for your own applications.

A section of the report. | Screenshot by author

Rules here like ‘ATL1APP-x’, etc imply what is a fit platform. For example, ‘A1L-APP-3’ means you have docker running in a VM, consider running it directly on GKE.

You can read other rule inferences here. It is quite amazing to me what this tool can do! To know more about the mFit tool, or to check what other platforms you can check your readiness for, head to this section in the Google Cloud docs.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment, or reach out to me on Linkedin/Twitter! 💁🏽‍♀️