So, you’ve read our e-book and are convinced that adopting an open hybrid cloud Platform is a key part of digitally transforming. Great! Now how do you get your applications and associated infrastructure there?

There are many aspects that should be considered when digitally transforming and adopting an open hybrid cloud including people, culture, process, and technology. While these are all important, in this post we will focus on process and technology.

A common way of speaking about migrating or modernizing workloads to the cloud was popularized in 2016 by Amazon Web Services in their post, "6 Strategies for Migration Applications to the Cloud." We will use the categorization popularized in that article to explore how Red Hat is making it quicker and easier to move your applications and their associated infrastructure to the open hybrid cloud.

Discover & Decide

Red Hat has multiple tools that can help in the discovery and decision phases of the process.

Pathfinder, a consultant-driven application assessment tool, is used to help customers determine which applications can be containerized, the effort involved, and identify impediments to the process. This helps customers determine the order in which applications should migrate to containers, based on factors such as business criticality, technical and execution risk, and estimates of the effort required.

In addition to Pathfinder, Red Hat’s Migration Analytics service available on cloud.redhat.com allows you to determine the total number of workloads in your environment, their current status, and the level of effort needed to migrate or modernize each. Available free of charge, the service also provides detailed infrastructure and application inventories, high priority migration targets, cost savings estimates, and potential risks to mitigate when migrating.

Execution

After discovering and deciding which "R" is right for each application and its associated infrastructure the next step is execution. Within the areas of rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring Red Hat has the ability to help. Let’s look at a few examples.

Rehosting and Replatforming

If you decide to "lift-and-shift" your applications and associated infrastructure to the open hybrid cloud Red Hat maintains several tools to help in this journey.

Red Hat Application Migration Toolkit is an assembly of open source tools that enables large-scale application migrations and modernizations. The tooling consists of multiple individual components that provide support for each phase of a migration process. The migrations supported include application platform upgrades, migrations to a cloud-native deployment environment, and also migrations from several commercial products to the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

The Cluster Application Migration tool (CAM) migrates stateful and stateless applications from the source cluster on OpenShift 3 to a destination cluster running the latest OpenShift. It also can migrate applications between OpenShift 4 clusters. It is easily installed on your destination cluster via an Operator.

The Infrastructure Migration Solution provides tools that allow customers to migrate virtual machines from proprietary virtualization platforms such as VMware to Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. These tools are fully supported by Red Hat allowing for technical support during the migration process.

While migrating virtual machines, organizations often desire to optimize other aspects of their environment. For example, they may wish to standardize the operating systems underlying their applications to gain greater efficiency or improve their security posture. The Convert2RHEL tool allows you to convert CentOS and Oracle Linux systems into supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems in an automated fashion.

In addition to the tools we explored, Red Hat services are available to assist you with rehosting and replatforming approaches as well, and Red Hat Learning Subscriptions provide access to an extensive curriculum that can help grow the skills you’ll need to be successful.

Refactoring

If you decide to refactor or re-architect your applications and associated infrastructure Red Hat Services has offerings that can help.

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs is an immersive teaming residency that arms customers with the skills, tools, and processes to deliver better software, more quickly, to meet the demands of today’s market. Working closely with experts in DevOps and cloud-native application development from Red Hat, customers learn how to modernize their legacy applications or develop all new ones during the engagement. In the end, they leave with a working application prototype and the methods and skills to lead transformation initiatives within their organization.

Partners

In addition to providing tools, web services, and consulting services to ease the journey to open hybrid cloud, Red Hat has a rich ecosystem of technology and channel partners that can help customers move their workloads to the open hybrid cloud including CloudHedge, Cloudical, Corent, Hystax, Trilio, Tidal Migrations, and more.

Get Started Today

We hope this overview gives you a better sense of how Red Hat is helping organizations realize the vision of open hybrid cloud by providing tools, web services, and services to make the journey faster and easier. To learn more about Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud and how you can begin your journey please contact Red Hat to talk to an expert.