As part of the Globex’ digital transformation and cloud adoption initiative, the development and devops teams embarked upon a journey to modernize their existing siloed services running on the virtual machines on Red Hat Virtualization and containerized applications on Red Hat OpenShift separately.
The goal is to assess the siloed current application portfolio and identify potential issues and risks to implement advanced cloud native architecture with the application modernization.
To start the assessment of the existing applications we will use the Tackle Application Assessment tool in the Konveyor community to move our applications. We will use Tackle to assess the Customers service based on the Tomcat server on Red Hat Virtualization.
Open a new browser to access the Tackle web console that is provided from the shared environment detail page. Use the following credential.
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Username or email:
tackle -
Password:
password
You will see existing application inventories such as Customers, Orders, and RetailFrontend.
Tackle Application Inventory is the vehicle which selects applications for assessment by Pathfinder and analysis by windup. It provides users four main functions:
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Maintain a portfolio of applications.
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Link applications to the business services they support.
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Define interdependencies.
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Add metadata using an extensible tagging model to describe and categorize applications in multiple dimensions.
Tackle Pathfinder is an interactive questionnaire based tool that assesses the suitability of applications for modernization in order to deploy them into containers on an enterprise Kubernetes platform. The tool output includes:
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Application’s suitability for Kubernetes
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Associated risks
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Adoption plan with the applications’ prioritization, business criticality and dependencies.
Tackle Controls are a collection of entities that add value to Application Inventory and the Pathfinder assessment. They comprise business services, stakeholders, stakeholder groups, job functions, tag types, and tags.
Go to Controls on the left menu and you will existing stakeholders such as Hank Scorpio and Homer Simpson.
You can also find the existing stakeholder groups such as IT Management and Retail Management for the application assessment.
Applications can be classified and grouped in multiple ways such as business service. We’ve created a business service for the legacy Retail applications.
Go to Controls on the left menu and click on Business services tab. You will see existing business services such as Finance and HR and Retail.
Let’s focus on the legacy application. We have added tags that represent its technology, like java, Tomcat and Oracle, and decided to add a custom tag type that allows us to identify which custom architecture libraries are used by each application.
Go to Application inventory on the left menu and click on pencil icon for the customers inventory.
Fill in the following fields. Then, click on Save.
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Note
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Do not press the |
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Business service:
Retail -
Tags:
Java,Tomcat,RHEL 8,Oracle
The assessment is driven by multiple questionnaires and aims to determine the suitability for containerization for a given application. It covers all the different areas of the application landscape, including the technology, application lifecycle management, and operations. These questionnaires allow the tool to identify potential risks that might prevent the application from running in containers or would require any kind of adjustment for that.
Since the legacy application comes from a traditional platform, we already have assessed the retail services to identify technical problems a while back. However, we couldn’t answer the configuration model during the first assessment by the SRE team. So we just left the answer as Unknown at that time.
Today, you’ll run the second assessment to choose the proper answer in the cross-cutting concerns section for the customers application.
Click on Assess.
When you see This application has already been assessed. Do you want to continue? message, click on Continue to make sure to proceed the assessment once again.
First step will be to select the stakeholders (e.g. Homer Simpson) involved with the assessment. Leave the default values.
Click on Next.
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Note
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Take a look how the former answers were chosen in the initial assessment for each application assessment section such as |
Choose the following answer for the How is the application configured? question. The SRE team finally figured out that the customers application currently refers to multiple configurations in the separated file systems.
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Question - How is the application configured?
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Answer -
Multiple configuration files in multiple file system locations
Click on Save and review.
You will be presented with the review screen. It allows you to find out which risks were identified during the assessment and decide which migration strategy to follow based on that.
Scroll down the screen to view the risks. This legacy application uses a discovery mechanism that is not cloud-friendly, which makes sense since it comes from a classic platform and accesses a database through a static IP.
Now that you know there will be some changes required in the source code to adapt the application, we can decide that the strategy will be Refactor.
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Proposed action:
Refactor -
Effort estimate:
Small
Since this is a key application in the architecture, we’re going to set the criticality and priority to 10.
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Business criticality:
10 -
Work priority:
9
Click on Submit Review.
Now that you have completed the 2nd assessment to update the Application cross-cutting concerns section. You have also identified a new high risk along with the external configuration references and dependencies.
Go to Report on the left menu. Then filter the report by Retail business service and you will find out the report details such as Current landscape, Suggested adoption plan, and Identified risks.
➡️ 3. Analyze