Many companies still host and run legacy software and in-house applications in their on-premises data centers. (According to recent research only 5% of x86 workloads have been migrated to the cloud.) Supporting these applications can be a burdensome, manual, and time-consuming task. It requires expertise to maintain the software itself as well as the infrastructure it is running on. In a time when there is a clear shift away from the corporate datacenter to public cloud infrastructure, and modern applications are being built and delivered to take advantage of distributed cloud architectures, smart businesses are planning and executing on a cloud migration strategy.
Cloud application migration comes in many forms and enterprises have been told for years that to truly realize cloud benefits, applications must be re-architected. But re-architecting takes a lot of work, and many companies find it difficult to resource or prioritize re-architecting (rewriting) their applications. Aside from rewriting the applications, companies have been left to choose between abandoning them in favor of a SaaS offering, or rehosting (‘lift & shift’) them as simple VMs where possible.
Rehosting (lift & shift) can be appear to be an attractive option as a ‘light touch’ solution that doesn’t require you to revise or rewrite your application code. And it does get your application out of the data center. But that’s pretty much where the benefits end. Remember, the difficulties of maintaining the data center infrastructure represent only half the challenge – the ‘day 0’ tasks. The other challenges, the day 1 and beyond tasks, come with maintaining and updating the applications themselves. Rehosting only addresses your ‘day 0’ issues. In addition, this lift & shift approach offers little to no additional cloud benefit in the form of scalability or automation.
What if there was an application migration solution that filled the gap between the rigor of re- architecting your applications and the simplicity of rehosting? A tool to automate packaging, deploying and maintaining your custom applications in the cloud that optimizes the application for the target cloud and simplifies ongoing maintenance and security...without requiring a rewrite?
Bitnami has been working on delivering exactly that! A tool that leverages our expertise in packaging applications for the leading cloud providers, but can be leveraged externally by enterprises to simplify the migration of their applications to the cloud. A tool that bridges the gap between rehosting and re-architecting, a category we refer to as replatforming.
Replatforming with Bitnami is also a light touch solution that does not require you to update your application code. It requires about the same effort as rehosting, and delivers all the same day 0 benefits, but it also delivers day 1 and beyond automation and simplification benefits such as:
- Automating the updating and application rebuild process
- Tracking and managing build components and versions
- Providing templates to optimize your application for the target platform
- Using a single build process to create multiple target images
- Monitoring the build components and alerting you when updates are available
All of the above remove a significant burden from your IT staff, freeing up time and simplifying the application updating process. And it can all be done without source code modifications or specialized development skills or knowledge.
Sound Interesting? This new tool from Bitnami will be available soon!
Can’t wait? Ping us using the form at https://bitnami.com/enterprise and we’ll be happy to schedule a demo.