Among the various cloud migration options, the refactoring strategy helps you break down monolith workloads into multiple container-based microservices to achieve a highly-scalable and agile cloud environment. But how does it work when a cloud migration is moving workloads to Kubernetes?
In this article, we discuss the various benefits and challenges of refactoring applications to Kubernetes in cloud migrations. We also discuss the various approaches to refactor applications while learning use cases and benefits of each.
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Kubernetes is an incredibly powerful tool for managing and orchestrating containerized workloads. It can help you automate a lot of effort-intensive, error-prone tasks associated with managing workloads, such as scaling resources to meet traffic spikes, or faster rollout of new application versions. And because it's open source, there's a thriving community of developers who are constantly improving Kubernetes and adding new features and functionality.
Organizations embracing a Kubernetes-based cloud framework typically aim to future-proof their legacy stack or monolith workloads while taking advantage of a container-native ecosystem for enhanced agility and portability.
A typical approach is also to refactor workloads to a Kubernetes orchestrated container infrastructure, which is designed to be highly extensible and customizable to support different use cases. With that in mind, it is important to note that refactoring alone cannot solve inherent architectural flaws. Additionally, without diligent planning and clear objectives, refactoring legacy apps may often lead to higher expenses and reduced application performance.
The merits of refactoring applications to Kubernetes include:
Although self-healing capabilities can’t prevent all outages or failures, they can help reduce the impact of those that do occur by replacing, rescheduling, or restarting failed containers. This helps maintain optimum uptime without disrupting user experience.
While Kubernetes offers the flexibility and scalability to manage containerized workloads, managing a distributed ecosystem of clusters also introduces a number of complexities. These include:
Refactoring legacy applications requires the restructuring of various workload components to support containerization. There are a number of approaches that can be taken to refactor workloads in a Kubernetes ecosystem, and the most appropriate approach often depends on the workload type, dependencies, and organizational use case.
Source code refactoring involves building a container image that packages the existing application code, its libraries, dependencies, and an operating system to run entirely on Kubernetes.
This approach of refactoring changes the structure of the application and adds new cloud-native features while retaining its functionality and run-time behavior. Refactoring source code is typically used for legacy applications that are either incompatible with modern computing practices, applications with minimal or missing documentation, or those without an ongoing support roadmap.
Benefits:
Database refactoring involves the alteration of database schemas and their backend storage for improved data access. Depending on the type of database being used, database refactoring involves the transformation of key-value entries, batch data updates or table denormalization to improve the design and performance of the database.
Database refactoring is mostly used for applications:
Benefits:
UI refactoring involves making changes to graphical interfaces on the presentation tier for maintaining consistency without making functional or logical changes. While a UI refactoring approach requires minimal changes, it may introduce scope creep resulting from the need to include undocumented dependencies and application functionalities.
Refactoring user interface is typically used in instances that require a phased migration strategy of the legacy app, which assumes the user experience stays consistent while cluster administrators work on migrating other components of the workload to Kubernetes clusters.
Benefits:
Complete refactoring involves changing the entire codebase, databases and user interface to utilize comprehensive benefits of a cloud-native feature set. As an exhaustive app modernization approach, components and dependencies of all the application tiers are refactored to operate on a containerized ecosystem for enhanced agility and scalability.
A full application refactoring is considered suitable for use cases:
Benefits:
Enterprises embrace the cloud to help them become more agile, efficient, and resilient, but it comes with its own challenges. Most often, there is also the lack of understanding towards the right migration approach and whether workloads would operate optimally as desired in the post-migration framework. NetApp BlueXP fits perfectly in such instances by bringing the best out of a cloud migration, regardless of which one of the cloud migration strategies you chose.
BlueXP combines all of NetApp’s data services to provide one interface for users to control all aspects of their data estates. At its center is BlueXP Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading storage management platform that abstracts the implementation of storage services for workloads running in the cloud or in hybrid setups. Cloud Volumes ONTAP offers seamless scaling, portability, and data protection for persistent volumes, enabling production-ready storage for Kubernetes applications.
By leveraging NetApp Astra Trident as the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin for integrating with Kubernetes, Cloud Volumes ONTAP serves as the backend storage management of persistent workloads, whether on AWS EBS, Azure managed disks, or Google Persistent Disk. Trident provides features beyond those allowed by the CSI and can be used to orchestrate storage with Docker, Red Hat OpenShift, and other popular container platforms.
To find out more about how the storage platform can help manage data and scale workloads while minimizing cloud expenses, check out these Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Kubernetes success stories.
As organizations move to adopt Kubernetes, they often need to refactor their workloads to take advantage of the benefits that Kubernetes can offer. Irrespective of the refactoring approach, it is important to consider the impact on existing processes and dependencies, as well as the training and support requirements for teams that will be working with Kubernetes.
In order to take full advantage of Kubernetes, it is important to understand how to properly refactor source code into modularity components that can be run in parallel. This process can be complex and time-consuming, but the benefits of a well-designed Kubernetes infrastructure are numerous. For enterprise-scale deployments, it’s easier to do that with NetApp BlueXP.
BlueXP can help you build, protect, and govern your Kubernetes workloads in your hybrid and multicloud data estate, whether you’re performing a refactoring, a more traditional lift and shift, or any other migration. To find out more, read these migration success stories with BlueXP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP.