AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Simplify Application Cutover with Integrated OmniDeq and AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces
By Sameer Karmarkar, CTO and Co-Founder – CloudHedge.io
By Shilpa Andam, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Dinesh Raveendran, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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| CloudHedge |
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Many organizations utilize cloud-based infrastructure and are modernizing or adopting services that accelerate business agility and the pace of innovation. This typically results in more frequent product releases and increased revenue.
Containerization is a modernization pathway that can lead to these business outcomes. In fact, a recent whitepaper released by Known and Amazon Web Services (AWS) found that 72% of organizations chose containerization and saw a 28% increase in average revenues.
It’s important to note that these statistics were observed by organizations that chose to modernize their apps using containerization, not simply run an existing monolith inside a container. This distinction is key as the deconstruction of the monolith into microservices leads to increased agility, operational resilience, and innovation, thus resulting in the outcomes observed in the study.
Containerization isn’t without its challenges. Applications being modernized normally require multiple rounds of application cutover—a manual process that demands highly skilled resources, often with high risk and costs.
In this post, we will explore a two-step modernization approach crafted by CloudHedge and AWS that helps organizations modernize an application continuously and incrementally, regardless of where they are in their journey. We’ll articulate how the CloudHedge continuous modernization platform, OmniDeq, integrates with AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces in its automation-driven modernization workflow.
CloudHedge is an AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partner that analyzes existing IT applications and automatically recommends and transforms monolith applications to be cloud-native.
Joint Solution Overview
AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces is a managed refactor service that implements the strangler fig pattern and enables users to effectively deconstruct a monolith into various microservices. It also allows users to extend existing applications with new features built as microservices.
The CloudHedge OmniDeq platform helps enterprises discover the run-time posture of any application, and subsequently transform and deploy that application into a cloud-optimized container running on any AWS container service. The level of automation and information visibility with packaged best practices reduces the risk involved with modernizing applications to AWS.
The diagram in Figure 1 depicts standard infrastructure that’s deployed as part of a Refactor Spaces implementation.
Figure 1 – AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces deployment.
Here, we have an account where the old monolith lives along with a new account for new microservices. The account holding the Refactor Spaces networking elements are held in a separate account and used to route traffic between the monolith and new microservices.
The cutover of new microservices requires configuration changes to route new endpoints accordingly, and this effort is manual. As we continue through this post, we’ll see how CloudHedge’s OmniDeq platform helps automate this process.
Before OmniDeq can deploy microservices, application owners need to describe the details of their application to OmniDeq. This is handled through a capability known as Application Blueprints.
An application blueprint simplifies the modelling of application configurations by enabling application owners to easily describe all services and interdependencies of their services. This is key to ensuring the application workload is portable and consistent, which ultimately leads to simplified deployments and reduced deployment errors.
With the application microservice described in a blueprint, we are ready to deploy the new cloud-optimized container. But where do we deploy this container, and how is traffic going to be routed between the original monolith and new microservice?
Refactor Spaces provides the necessary cloud infrastructure, including the relevant networking componentry to manage this communication. With this service enabled through OmniDeq, the solution can focus on solving the original challenge, namely automating the application cutover process.
Step 1: Binary Refactoring + Cutover Monolith Using OmniDeq
Application owners that are running their applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or virtual machines (on premises) can leverage OmniDeq and easily convert their monolithic application and deploy it on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters.
The containerization of applications is accelerated using smart automation. In this stage, OmniDeq performs containerization by assessing application runtime binaries along with its configuration and environment variables. This is called “binary refactoring” as it does not require access to the source code of application.
One of the most important considerations is using Refactor Spaces to make the transition smoother. OmniDeq’s Application Blueprint can utilize AWS credentials to automatically configure Refactor Spaces. Users can choose the integrated automation workflow to populate appropriate services and routes once applications are deployed on EKS with correct endpoints.
Figure 2 – Lift and shift to the cloud.
The diagram in Figure 2 depicts a scenario of source environment already running in the corporate data center on virtual machines or bare metal instances. This could also be running on Amazon EC2 instances. OmniDeq makes it possible to set up Refactor Spaces from scratch or use an existing environment to deploy the modernized workloads.
The importance of a standardized or templatized configuration of workloads is critical to maintain consistency and avoid configuration drift in application environments. OmniDeq’s integration with Refactor Spaces automates cutover and removes the manual step of updating Refactor Spaces configuration.
Application owners can configure Refactor Spaces once and make the cutover seamless via automation managed by OmniDeq.
Step 2: Continuous Modernization
This scenario addresses refactoring an already containerized application version during Step 1 by adding a new microservice using a second container service in the next iteration of application.
Post-onboarding to Refactor Spaces, application engineering teams will follow the strangler fig pattern and introduce new microservices to an existing application component. Because of the seamless networking integration across accounts by Refactor Spaces, these new microservices can reside in different AWS accounts on different EKS or AWS Fargate clusters as represented below.
For example, a new refactored auth service (route configured as /auth) can been created and deployed in new AWS account.
Figure 3 – Monolith to microservices.
The Refactor Spaces integration in this case provides support for smooth cutover as application transitions to add new service in the new version.
With OmniDeq integrated with Refactor Spaces, customers only have to introduce configuration of new microservice to their application blueprint version.
Application services deployment in the same or various AWS accounts will be handled automatically through the integration, along with deployment of the new version. This delivers smooth cutover from older versions of the application to newer versions of application deployment of refactored version(s).
Conclusion
In this post, we articulated how the OmniDeq continuous modernization platform integrates with AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces in its automation-driven modernization workflow.
This integration supports the strangler fig pattern of incremental application modernization. As the application transitions in its natural multi-step, continuous modernization from one version to another, the integration takes the risk out of the cutover process.
Together, OmniDeq and Refactor Spaces deliver the crucial benefit of risk reduction in terms of service outages and smooth cutover to newer feature functionality.
Learn more about the OmniDeq and AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces integration on AWS Marketplace.
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CloudHedge – AWS Partner Spotlight
CloudHedge is an AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partner that analyzes existing IT applications and automatically recommends and transforms monolith applications to be cloud-native.