Software and Platforms

Great migration: Shifting to cloud native architecture

July 1, 2019

RESEARCH REPORT

In brief

By leveraging modern cloud native computing foundation platforms enterprises can move away from monolithic legacy application environments.
This new architecture will not only be cloud agnostic, but also will be robust and can flex to meet customer needs.
Using new technologies requires a change in mindset, and organizations’ cultures should facilitate this.
Those willing to embark on the great migration can move from legacy environments to new cloud native architectures and capture the advantages.

Shifting your appliance to a cloud native architecture

Monolith legacy applications can be cumbersome and face issues that more nimble modern cloud native platforms do not. Cost is a challenge, as hardware and resources must be pre-provisioned. However, a bigger issue is that the individual components and services of monolith applications cannot be scaled and deployed separately.

Many legacy applications were designed using technologies such as integrated java or .Net stack. These stacks include a user interface (UI), backend, middleware and database, all integrated as one deployable component within the application server. Many were designed for traditional hardware-based devices or appliances. Hardware appliances, (e.g., those providing networking features such as network traffic management, security and load balancing) and application stacks delivered as appliances do not allow application components to be independently scaled. Therefore, they cannot take advantage of a huge benefit of the cloud: scaling based on the need.

With enterprise boundaries blurring every day, the need for a platform ecosystem is becoming imperative, which is driving a growing need to overcome some of the above hurdles and migrate legacy apps and appliances to a cloud native architecture.

Those willing to embark on the great migration can successfully move from legacy environments to new cloud native architectures and capture the advantages such architectures offer.

What does it mean to be Cloud native?

To be cloud native, applications need to have the following architecture elements:

Microservices

Service Oriented Architecture has evolved into a loosely coupled microservices architecture.
Modern architecture is microservices-oriented & based on 12 factor app principles.
Enabling greater agility & speed, experimentation, innovation & ability to pick the right tool for a service.
Support for polyglot service is another new age requirement.

Container packaged

Containers are required for velocity, portability, reliability, efficiency, self-service and isolation.
Containers, which are standalone, enable the ability to isolate each microservice deployment independently.
This leads to higher levels of compute resource isolation, portability and scalability.

Dynamically managed

Orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes support dynamic scheduling and managing all the containers and corresponding resources deployed to the underlying infrastructure platform.

Cloud agnostic

Typically, product companies deliver their product in all forms of cloud infrastructure including on-premise (vSphere).
Being cloud native makes the product available in different marketplaces (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) and ensures customers are not locked into any particular vendor.

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The great migration

In this whitepaper, we explore how, by leveraging modern Cloud Native Computing Foundation platforms like Kubernetes and the Istio ecosystem, enterprises can move away from monolithic legacy application environments. This new architecture will not only be cloud agnostic, but also will be robust and can flex to meet customer needs. Using new technologies requires a change in mindset, and organizations’ cultures should facilitate this.

Those willing to embark on the great migration can successfully move from legacy environments to new cloud native architectures and capture the advantages such architectures offer.