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Leading companies are realizing that cloud is how to deploy IT, not where. Cloud capabilities have become a prerequisite for consuming IT resources, and organizations are now focusing on modernization of applications with a cloud native approach.

You have many approaches for moving into the cloud, including:

• Modernizing and optimizing your existing on-premises applications
• Creating new cloud-native applications
• Opening up enterprise data centers to work with cloud services

IBM’s approach to application modernization

IBM aims to help clients preserve the investment they’ve made in enterprise systems and at the same time help them enable new capabilities to drive added value. So, the ideal approach would be modernizing and optimizing existing on-premises applications.

There are good opportunities for organizations running traditional applications like IBM WebSphere Application Server on an IBM AIX logical partition (LPAR) to seek out application modernization. Several steps are involved in modernizing these applications, however, and it requires a high degree of familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes and Helm concepts. IBM Systems Lab Services has expertise in these technologies to help clients to modernize applications.

IBM has developed innovative solutions, tools and services to help organizations modernize their existing application portfolio.

IBM Cloud Private on Power Systems

IBM Power Systems has always been focused on reliability and performance. This makes Power Systems ideally suited for enterprise private cloud infrastructure solutions. Power Systems are optimized for the work at hand, with superior price-performance, reduced operating costs, higher container density and better throughput.

IBM has made considerable investment in enterprise private cloud, focusing on application modernization (containers) and workload optimization.

IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor

IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor is a tool available to all IBM Cloud Private customers at no additional charge, which consumes information about a client’s current on-premises applications that run on WebSphere Application Server for rapid deployment on WebSphere Application Server and Liberty in public or private cloud environments. These inputs are combined with rules and insights gained from years of working with WebSphere and WebSphere applications to provide recommendations for clients’ cloud journey. IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor is not limited to WebSphere but also currently supports JBoss, WebLogic and IBM MQ.

IBM Microclimate

IBM Microclimate is an end-to-end development environment that lets you rapidly create, edit and deploy applications. This is available as Helm Chart in the IBM Cloud Private catalog at no additional charge. Applications are run in containers from day one and can be delivered into production on Kubernetes through an automated DevOps pipeline using Jenkins. Microclimate can be installed on IBM Cloud Private, and, of course, sits on top of IBM Power Systems.

IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor leverages Microclimate and Jenkins to migrate traditional apps to containerized/cloud-native apps onto IBM Cloud Private running on IBM Power Systems.

Use Case: Migrate sample WebSphere Application Server application running on AIX LPAR to IBM Cloud Private running on IBM Power Systems

What follows is a typical migration procedure to move a sample application “PlantsByWebSphere” from AIX to IBM Cloud Private platform.

Migration flow

• Run IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor data collector tool on on-premises applications
• Upload collected data to Cloud Transformation Advisor tool, which will analyze the data/configuration
• Review recommendations provided by Cloud Transformation Advisor and plan for migration
• Cloud Transformation Advisor creates necessary deployment artifacts and uploads them to GitHub
• Cloud Transformation Advisor initiates IBM Microclimate pipeline
• Microclimate creates Jenkins project, which should be built
• Jenkins pulls artifacts from GitHub, builds container image and pushes it to IBM Cloud Private registry
• Microclimate initiates install of the newly built application onto IBM Cloud Private running on IBM Power Systems

Need support for IBM Cloud Private on Power Systems?

IBM Systems Lab Services offers a wide range of services to support clients’ private cloud and DevOps journey. If you’re interested in talking to Lab Services or need more information on IBM Cloud Private on IBM Power Systems, contact us today.

For an end-to-end demonstration of application modernization using IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor, watch the video tutorial.

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