Migrating Hundreds of Legacy Applications to Kubernetes – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

CloudNativeCon North America 2017, Austin, Texas (USA), December 2017 (Dr. Josef Adersberger)
View slider

Running applications on Kubernetes can provide a lot of benefits: more dev speed, lower ops costs, and a higher elasticity & resiliency in production. Kubernetes is the place to be for cloud native apps. But what to do if you have no shiny new cloud native apps but a whole bunch of JEE legacy systems? No chance to leverage the advantages of Kubernetes? Yes you have!

We’re facing the challenge of migrating hundreds of JEE legacy applications of a major German insurance company onto a Kubernetes cluster within one year. We’re now close to the finish line and it worked pretty well so far. The talk will be about the lessons we’ve learned – the best practices and pitfalls we’ve discovered along our way. We’ll provide our answers to life, the universe and a cloud native journey like:

– What technical constraints of Kubernetes can be obstacles for applications and how to tackle these?

– How to architect a landscape of hundreds of containerized applications with their surrounding infrastructure like DBs MQs and IAM and heavy requirements on security?

– How to industrialize and govern the migration process?

– How to leverage the possibilities of a cloud native platform like Kubernetes without challenging the tight timeline?