Introducing IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor
The cloud lures one and all these days. Many claims of optimization, agility and velocity accompany the promise of the cloud. The questions that follow are often inquiries about what to move to the cloud, how to get to the cloud and which cloud to move to. IBM’s Transformation Advisor is a tool that helps WebSphere customers determine “what” to move to the cloud and offers suggestions on how to get there. This post introduces the Transformation Advisor and provides a brief view of what it is and what it is not. Transformation Advisor offers insight into how we can accelerate movement of existing applications to the cloud. It can seed and guide a transformation which can realize that much sought after optimization, agility, and velocity
Transformation Advisor is a tool that consumes information about your applications and leverages your input as to which cloud options should be pursued. These inputs are combined with rules and insights gained from years of working with WebSphere and WebSphere applications. Of course, we at IBM know how WebSphere works from the inside which helps us create the rules inside the tool. From these inputs, Transformation Advisor provides guidance and insights on where to start the journey to cloud, how to get that first application running on the cloud, and what application changes are necessary. There is obviously a bit more to it than this, but let us start here.
Lift and shift is a phrase thrown around a lot when talking about moving to the cloud. This new tool is not precisely a lift and shift advisor. Lift and shift often connotes bringing entire solutions, as is, to the cloud by moving the solution’s virtual machines directly to the cloud. That can be good if you need to quickly get out of your data center and into a cloud provider’s facilities. However, in the case of WebSphere solutions, for example, this means you are on the same version of WebSphere in the cloud, the same edition of WebSphere, and you necessarily drag most prior DevOps and development practices along as well. Transformation Advisor is focused on bringing your application source code to the cloud along with whatever minimal configuration information is needed to run the applications. It then can bring varying amounts of existing DevOps depending on your selected target and appetite for investing to get the rewards of velocity and agility above that of optimization. This allows you to focus on modernizing your applications without worrying about migrating your runtime.
The initial scope of Transformation Advisor is to help customers understand what it takes to transform WebSphere applications to run on in as well as considering the implications of running on . Strategically, we will cover different target cloud options. The architecture of the tool also accommodates consuming different application sources beyond WebSphere, so look for that to possibly happen in the future.
To better understand the scope and possibilities here, let us talk through a quick fictional example. Let’s say we have an existing WebSphere application, running on WebSphere 8.5. Let’s say this application is a bit of a monolith, supporting a number of URLs for external consumers and leveraging a number of databases and external services in the implementation.
Further, we will assume that the target environment is to run on WebSphere Liberty and use IBM Cloud Private as the cloud execution environment.
The first step is to start up the tool and go through a quick interview. This interview asks about what your intended goal for these applications is. The answers provided flavor the advice provided once all application data is collected.
After the interview, you must download and run a data collector in an environment where this application was running. We would recommend a pre-production environment or any environment that is really close to what we might find in production.
Once the data is gathered, the Transformation Advisor will come back with an inventory of what it has found in the environment. Further, the tool will provide insights as to which applications will be the easiest, at least from a source code perspective, to get running on WebSphere Liberty on IBM Cloud Private. In this example, we are essentially updating the application to run on WebSphere Liberty from traditional WebSphere 8.5 and thus some of the changes relate to that transition while others relate to the cloud itself.
You can see other useful information as well — the approximate amount of effort it will take to move to this configuration, possible issues and any potential technology incompatibilities. You should click on the View Details button to see further information. In some cases Transformation Advisor may not recommended your preferred platform. You will see a red x in the recommendation which indicates a particular environment is not recommended.
In current form, this is where the work begins on the part of the application development team. The results show just how close some of your applications are to getting value from IBM Cloud Private and WebSphere Liberty, at least in the case of our example. How much value is accessible depends on the individual situations. Clients have inventories of applications at various stages of maturity, needing various amounts of ongoing investment, care and feeding as well as update. Only you know where the current pain points are. The following sections describe some of the things to consider then as the results of the tool are leveraged.
The simplest thing to do is to move all of the applications to a single WebSphere Liberty that is stood up and available in IBM Cloud Private. This means that the datastores stay where they are and the external services leveraged are accessed in largely the same way. The value comes from running on Docker and running in the Kubernetes world which is IBM Cloud Private. Kubernetes will take care of scheduling this application onto worker nodes. The development and infrastructure team will need to make some decisions about replica sets and pods and figure out if there is value to leveraging some of the features of IBM Cloud Private beyond Kubernetes and the orchestration it provides for Docker containers. Think about leveraging features of IBM Cloud Private and updating the DevOps pipeline enough to avoid having to update these environments and prefer to instead have a new Docker image made available when updates are needed. There is a lot of value just in this step. Immutable images are powerful.
The next option to consider is to take each application which was analyzed and move them one at a time, each to an individual Kubernetes pod or pods. Why is this interesting? This is interesting because now there will be multiple WebSphere Liberty environments, one per each application. These can then be scaled, maintained and managed on a separate life-cycle. Independent scaling can optimize underlying hardware (compute, memory) resources required. Independent maintenance can mean less testing per change cycle and the opportunity for some applications to more aggressively be updated and refined than others.
Beyond this, there are more possibilities. New features and functions or slow replacement of the features and functions in the original application can and should be done as separate micro-services. They will again be put into the same Kubernetes cluster and thus run in much the same conditions as the applications Transformation Advisor guided towards the cloud.
That all sounds great. However, some applications will look to be very costly to update and move to the selected target environment. These are then perhaps candidates to leave where they are and to put APIs in front of, so that they can deliver value on into the future from an ongoing and evolving set of consumers. More details on APIs and how to set all this up is a great topic, but one for another day.
Finally, early work with customers on Transformation Advisor has resulted in some side benefits. Identification of packaging issues, down level libraries and has led to recommending tactical changes to existing systems to reduce security risks, reduce coupling and save footprint.
Transformation Advisor is part of IBM Cloud Private 2.1 and available to be run both in the Community Edition (CE) and the Enterprise Edition (EE). More information about Transformation Advisor can be found here:
IBM Cloud Private information is available here:
Transformation Advisor is yet another capability from IBM that is intended to help with cloud adoption. If you have existing applications which can benefit by moving them to cloud via an approach that is a bit different than traditional lift and shift, take a look.
This entry was authored by Ryan Claussen, Eric Herness and Shikha Srivastava.
Originally published at https://www.ibm.com on October 26, 2017.
