From IBM Cloud Gen 1 to Gen 2, with Wanclouds Inc.

IBM Cloud has launched its next-generation cloud platform — known as Gen 2 — and with it comes the decision of retiring the Gen 1 VPC offering by the end of February 2021. The Gen 2 cloud holds the promise of better performance and a host of new features that are not available in Gen 1.

Since Gen 1 is being retired, a large number of VPCs living on Gen 1 with production workloads need to be migrated to Gen 2. Many IBM Cloud customers use the IBM managed Kubernetes service called IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service to orchestrate their Kubernetes clusters and need a migration partner to assist with a streamlined migration.

This post blog talks about the migration of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters in a hassle-free way which minimizes downtime using the “Multi-cloud Migrations as a Service” offering from Wanclouds Inc. Combined with cloud expert support and a re-imagined multicloud migrations approach through its VPC+ application, the migration timeframe is dramatically reduced, and, more importantly, there is very-little-to-no downtime, depending on how the workloads are deployed.

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes automates the manual deployment, management, and scaling processes of containerized applications. It is an open source platform and, therefore, has no formalized support structure around the technology. Moreover, Kubernetes needs additional components to become fully functional, like adding authentication, networking, security, monitoring, logs management, etc.

The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides a managed Kubernetes service to fill these gaps and provide customers with a fully managed Kubernetes infrastructure. It serves over 25,000 managed production clusters to customers, with master-enabled multi-zone clusters across six regions and 35 data centers. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service has highly secure environments for production workloads and offers built-in security at the container-level, including isolation policies, CIS-hardened infrastructure, and broad industry compliance, including PCI, HIPAA, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3.

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also provides auto cluster-scaling and intelligent provisioning with self-healing containers. You can also configure a custom Kubernetes cluster that auto-scales and recovers containers based on defined policies and creates health checks for critical components. Moreover, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides the best operational visibility into Kubernetes-based application services and platforms with advanced features to monitor, troubleshoot, and define custom alerts and dashboards, with 30-day retention all under your fingertips under a single pane of glass.

Wanclouds leverages IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service for its own applications

Wanclouds puts its trust in the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service for hosting VPC+ Cloud Migration, with its high availability and multi-zone cluster. It enables our site reliability engineers to provide an uninterrupted experience to our customers. With IBM Cloud Activity Tracker with LogDNA and IBM Cloud Log Analysis with LogDNA, our team has gained access to insights in the system and application that were not available to them before. It has made the cumbersome process of managing the user activity and tracking and analyzing logs much simpler and easier.

Platform monitoring can become challenging, but IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig has made it effortless for our teams with its metric collection process across the platform, including the containerized apps. Wanclouds site reliability engineers can now have a sweet repose while being aware of the fact that incidents will be prevented beforehand.

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is helping Wanclouds better manage workloads and reduce risks with DevOps practices, including short development sprints, iterations from bleeding edge to productions, etc. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service has become the key factor to the evolution of these processes and increasing usage of cloud infrastructure and microservices.

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Migrations as a Service by Wanclouds

Migration is a very tricky and cumbersome process that requires a dedicated team of individuals who are well-versed in every aspect of the cloud and have a complete understanding of the infrastructure and workloads of the organization. Add Kubernetes to the mix and it quickly becomes a challenging scenario that involves the VPC and all of its cloud function, as well as Kubernetes’ resources and the workloads running on top of it. This makes the already arduous cloud migration even more complicated.

Here at Wanclouds, we have developed an end-to-end solution to make IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service migrations a smooth, automated process. We leverage our VPC+ Cloud Migration app to automatically discover your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service resources and components that need to be migrated. You can choose the cluster that you want to migrate, and the app provisions these resources in a VPC with all of its data workloads running on it. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

Key features of Wanclouds’ IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Migration as a Service

• Discovery
  • VPC: Resources and components are discovered, including Address Prefixes,  Subnets, Public Gateways, Floating IPs, VPN Gateways, IKE Proposals, IPSEC Proposals, VSIs, Secondary Volumes, Load Balancers, Security Groups, ACLs, SSH Keys, and Custom Images.
  • IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service: Resources and components such as worker nodes, worker pools, Services, Pods, Namespaces, Secrets, StatefulSets, DaemonSet, Deployments, ConfigMaps, Custom Resource Definitions, and Persistent Volumes, along with all the other resources and workloads running within Kubernetes.
• Migration workspace: A migration workspace is created to migrate clusters, virtual server instances, and network functions so that we can view and verify infrastructure landscape, do a quick assessment, and plan your migration.
• Persistent volume migration: All of your PVCs attached to the cluster will be migrated along with their data. In the case of FileStorage, the PVCs will be converted to COS on the Gen 2 side.
• Workload migration: All of your Kubernetes workload resources — such as deployments, services, secrets, configs, etc. — will be migrated to Gen 2.
• Validate and verify: We work with the customer to validate and verify all the resources post migration.
• Zero downtime: There is no downtime involved in the migration of your cluster. You can run your Gen 1 cluster and validate the new cluster provisioned in Gen 2, giving you a smooth transition.

Ready to engage

Please contact us through our Wanclouds Inc. page for your cloud migration needs, or send an email to gen1-gen2@wanclouds.net.

For IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service questions, engage our team via Slack by registering here and join the discussion in the #general channel on our public IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Slack.