Google Cloud Anthos Series: Migrate for Anthos and GKE

Google Cloud Anthos Series: Part 8

Pushkar Kothavade

Published in

Google Cloud - Community

5 min readApr 1, 2022

Welcome to Part-8 of the ‘Google Cloud Anthos series’. You can find the complete series Here

Note: The company names (Samajik and Purogami) and personas (Ram and Guhan) mentioned in the storyline are fictional

Migrate for Anthos and GKE

This tool makes it fast and easy to modernize traditional applications away from virtual machines and into native containers. Find this tool in Anthos dashboard with the name ‘Migrate to containers’.

**Anthos Dashboard: Migrate for containers**

Use Migrate for Anthos and GKE to convert VM-based workloads into containers that run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Anthos clusters. Workloads from VMs that run on VMware, AWS, Azure, or Compute Engine can be migrated to GCP in container format with ease.

**Migrate VMs running on VMware, AWS, Azure, or Compute Engine to containers**

This unique automated approach extracts the critical application elements from the VM so that those elements can be easily inserted into containers in GKE or Anthos clusters without the VM layers (like Guest OS) that become unnecessary with containers.

This significantly reduces the cost and labor that would be required for a manual application modernisation project. Post migration customer’s DevOps team gets modern controls offered by the GKE/Anthos to manage these applications.

**Compatible operating systems and Kubernetes versions**.

Migrate for Anthos and GKE : Quickstart Guide

In this Quickstart hands-on guide, Create a simple Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) on GCP first then use ‘Migrate for Anthos and GKE’ to migrate the VM to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) processing cluster in the Cloud.

PART-1: GCE VM Setup

Create a GCE VM on Google cloud platform and install simple Apache web server application on it.

1.1. Setup Env Variables

PROJECT_ID="<your-project-id>"
REGION="<gcp-region>"
ZONE="<zone>"

1.2. Create a VM with a web server

gcloud compute instances create quickstart-instance \
 --project=${PROJECT_ID} --zone=${ZONE} --machine-type=e2-standard-2 \
 --subnet=default --scopes="cloud-platform" \
 --tags=http-server,https-server --image=ubuntu-minimal-1604-xenial-v20210119a \
 --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud --boot-disk-size=10GB --boot-disk-type=pd-standard \
 --boot-disk-device-name=quickstart-instance

1.3. Create a Firewall Rule

gcloud compute --project=${PROJECT_ID} firewall-rules create default-allow-http \
 --direction=INGRESS --priority=1000 --network=default --action=ALLOW \
 --rules=tcp:80 --source-ranges=0.0.0.0/0 --target-tags=http-server

1.4. SSH to the VM & Install the apache2 Package

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install apache2 -yecho '<!doctype html><html><body><h1>Hello World!</h1></body></html>' | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html

1.5. Verify the Installation
Open the browser and type http://<quickstart-instance-Public-IP>

1.6. Stop the VM

PART-2: GKE Processing Cluster Setup

2.1. Creating a processing cluster

Create a GKE cluster in the Cloud that you use as a processing cluster. This is where you install Migrate for Anthos and GKE and execute the migration.

gcloud container clusters create migration-processing \
--project=${PROJECT_ID} --zone=${ZONE} --machine-type e2-standard-4 \
--image-type ubuntu --num-nodes 1 \
--subnetwork "projects/${PROJECT_ID}/regions/${REGION}/subnetworks/default"

PART-3: Install ‘Migrate for Anthos and GKE’

3.1. Create the m4a-install service account

gcloud iam service-accounts create m4a-install \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID}

3.2. Grant the storage.admin role to the service account

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding ${PROJECT_ID}  \
  --member="serviceAccount:m4a-install@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com" \
  --role="roles/storage.admin"

3.3. Download the key file for the service account

gcloud iam service-accounts keys create m4a-install.json \
  --iam-account=m4a-install@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID}

3.4. Connect to the cluster

gcloud container clusters get-credentials migration-processing \
  --zone ${ZONE} --project ${PROJECT_ID}

3.5. Set up Migrate for Anthos and GKE components on the processing cluster

migctl setup install --json-key=m4a-install.json

3.6 Validate the Migrate for Anthos and GKE installation

migctl doctor

PART-4: Migrating the VM: Create Service Account

4.1. Create the m4a-ce-src service account

gcloud iam service-accounts create m4a-ce-src \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID}

4.2. Grant the compute.viewer role to the service account

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding ${PROJECT_ID}  \
  --member="serviceAccount:m4a-ce-src@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com" \
  --role="roles/compute.viewer"

4.3. Grant the compute.storageAdmin role to the service account

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding ${PROJECT_ID}  \
  --member="serviceAccount:m4a-ce-src@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com" \
  --role="roles/compute.storageAdmin"

4.4. Download the key file for the service account

gcloud iam service-accounts keys create m4a-ce-src.json \
  --iam-account=m4a-ce-src@${PROJECT_ID}.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID}

4.5. Create the migration source

migctl source create ce quickstart-source --project ${PROJECT_ID} --json-key=m4a-ce-src.json

PART-5: Migrating the VM: Create a migration

5.1. Create a migration Plan

migctl migration create my-migration --source quickstart-source \
  --vm-id quickstart-instance --intent Image

5.2. Check the migration status

migctl migration status my-migration

5.3. Download the migration plan

migctl migration get my-migration

5.4. Migrate the VM using the migration plan

migctl migration generate-artifacts my-migration

5.5. After the migration begins, check its status until it finishes

migctl migration status my-migration

PART-6: Deploying the migrated workload

6.1. Once the migration is complete, download the generated YAML artefacts

migctl migration get-artifacts my-migration

6.2. Add following service to the ‘deployment_spec.yaml’ file

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: hello-service
spec:
  selector:
    app: quickstart-instance
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 80
  type: LoadBalancer

6.3.Apply the deployment spec YAML to deploy the workload

kubectl apply -f deployment_spec.yaml

6.4. Check for an external IP address

kubectl get service hello-service

6.5. Test the migration by opening a browser and visiting the web page at the external IP address

http://<EXTERNAL-IP>

Check ‘Migrate to containers’ Dashboard under ‘Kubernetes Engine’ section on GCP console.

Reference

**https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIivdWyY5sqLbI6lgiwBLI6OJ94X7AjNW**

Coming up..

In this blog we discussed ‘Migrate for Anthos & GKE’ tool to migrate VMs to containers. In upcoming blogs we will continue the Samajik’s journey of Anthos adoption.

Contributors: Anchit Nishant, Shijimol A K, Dhandus

Google Cloud Anthos Series: Migrate for Anthos and GKE

Google Cloud Anthos Series: Part 8

Written by Pushkar Kothavade