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Red Hat and IBM Research have supported their hybrid cloud center with the latest open source project invented to make it simpler for organizations to move their legacy applications into a cloud-native environment.

The Konveyor Project is an overarching platform that involves various components targeted at different migration models. Those elements, or subprojects as Red Hat refers to them, use Red Hat’s Kubernetes Operators deployment model and are focused on re-hosting, re-platforming, or re-factoring legacy uses.

The most essential route is re-hosting, which James Labocki, senior director of project management for cloud platforms at Red Hat, described as targeted at companies or IT departments that cannot alter or change code. For this design, the Konveyor Project has its Crane and Forklift tools.

Crane is concentrated on migration applications among clusters running on various Kubernetes repetitions or enabling users to transfer those clusters to a diverse underlying infrastructure like if they were running within larger cloud deployments.

A forklift is focused on transferring virtual machines (VMs) to Kubernetes and can also migrate VMs into the open-source KubeVirt platform to give a combined approach for developers to help containerized workloads. KubeVirt can also drive to VM-based workloads that are hard to blend into a containerized environment.

Re-platforming is a bit more interested and typically needs a modification to the underlying technology used by an application but also reducing code modifications. This is usually the case when a company is shifting its applications into Kubernetes.

For this model, Red Hat has the Move2Kube subproject that penetrates past IBM workaround moving applications from the Docker Swarm container orchestrator or Cloud Foundry-based applications. Move2Kube changes present artifacts into Kubernetes-native theories to help that movement and enable those applications to work in the Kubernetes environment.

The most in-depth tool is the Tackle application that manages the more complicated job of re-factoring applications. This includes making necessary adjustments to the architecture and development of an application to run it into a cloud-native environment.

All four of these tools can take benefit of the fifth, which is Pelorus. This tool tests application metrics for software delivery performance, lead time for a move, deployment frequency, mean time to restore, and switch failure rate to see if the other tools are doing their job as exact.

Red Hat, IBM Research See an Opportunity

Labocki demonstrated that these tools give organizations a hybrid-cloud strategy to relocating their brownfield applications into the modern network architecture.

Labocki said that we all understand that there’s a chance for those that are enthusiastic and inspired to serve customers in a more exceptional way to open all of those tools so that people can profit from them. But also it’s not driving you into one cloud but it’s running into a hybrid cloud-like deployment over multiple clouds.

The timing of the launch to match with this week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2021 virtual event was not by luck. Labocki said that the Konveyor Project was in conversations with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) about a potential move into the open-source group’s regime.

The tools were formed by several meetings Red Hat treated with its community partners. The meetings gave a position for developers to prove what they were working on to handle this overall difficulty and challenged the use of non-proprietary technology and oftentimes a proof of the struggles.

Labocki continued that the project has had support from other CNCF projects on its meetups and also from other merchants like VMware and opponents of ours arriving and discussing their tooling and what they’re making as well as meetings with the IBM Research team.

Labocki told that we all believe that if we can get sufficient people using these tools in the community then they’re going to be demanding that vendors give these tools, and then when that occurs more people will get following the same toolset as opposed to attempting to use it as an exclusive differentiator.