A look at the benefits of an application modernization strategy with both containers and virtual machines.
There was a time, not so long ago, when IT departments and their supported development teams had to choose between virtual machines and containers, particularly in multiple cloud environments.
That is no longer the case.
With the right cloud platform, organizations can now deploy containers on top of virtual machines at scale in VMware environments. This makes it simpler and more cost-effective to modernize legacy applications while also accelerating the development of new cloud native applications and features.
In today’s era of digital transformation, big data, and other critical IT-driven initiatives, application modernization is more essential than ever. Here’s what you need to know.
Benefits of application modernization in the cloud
Public and hybrid clouds play a substantial role in enabling enterprises to modernize applications, including the ability to do the following:
- Standardize on app architectures that enhance agility and facilitate innovation.
- Capitalize on cloud-enabled innovations, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and more.
- Empower mobile use cases and a more diverse and distributed user base by leveraging the cloud’s geographic flexibility.
- Allow IT to automate administrative functions, shift to a usage-based cost model and achieve cost-effective agility and scalability.
Simplifying and automating application modernization
In moving forward with application modernization, many IT teams have run into a roadblock, specifically the challenge of empowering developers to easily use containers in VM environments.
The ability to leverage both containers and VMs using automation is an important differentiating feature available to customers of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions leveraging Red Hat OpenShift.
Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments. The platform is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote speed, agility, and innovation.
With Red Hat OpenShift, IT can simplify enterprise grade development of container-based applications across multiple environments—on-premises, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in both on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions has automated the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift on the public cloud. This enables enterprises to begin modernizing parts of their existing applications or to build new applications on containers alongside their VMs.
Modernizing at your own pace
The ability to utilize VMs and containers in a single cloud platform gives enterprises tremendous flexibility and agility in identifying which applications or features to modernize and then determining when and how to do so most efficiently.
The combination of Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions allows IT and developer teams to take a step-by-step approach to modernization, starting with lifting and shifting on-premises VMware workloads to the cloud.
This “lift and shift” delivers immediate benefits in speed, scale, and agility and does not require VM refactoring. Longer-term, it sets the stage for more extensive modernization efforts using containers. Whenever and wherever the organization decides to utilize containers, it can integrate them with VMware applications and/or build new cloud native applications and features.
Taking the next step
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions tightly integrates and automates the VMware SDDC with the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes-based application platform. Competitive services require refactoring of VMs prior to adoption, thus taking away control from enterprise customers.
With IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, enterprises can self-manage the entire stack to extend security and governance policies into the cloud, thereby achieving the speed and scale of the public cloud while maintaining control and visibility of a private cloud.
Are you ready to take advantage of containers and VMs in application modernization and development? Visit IBM for more information.
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