A quick demo of what a typical end-to-end traditional WAS modernization effort might look like. It's all about taking workloads that are running in something like a was nd on vms to running those same workloads in liberty and containers on top of openshift.
we're going to take a look at transformation advisor, which is one of the modernization tools
that IBM provides for moving workloads to Liberty.
Once the environment has been run through Transformation Advisor (TA), then it will provide some migration files to use, such as a docker file, or a maven file, or a kubernetes yaml file.
Those files can be used to go ahead and start your liberty deployment.
A full-on modernization effort could take many shapes and forms, this demo shows one way.
We will be focusing on transformation advisor (TA), which a fantastic tool when considering modernizing to liberty.
Transformation Advisor will analyze your entire website environment and it will provide you with detailed reports and recommendations as to which applications are simple, moderate or complex to move. That really helps you answer questions like which applications should I start with? What applications do I have in my environment? Which ones don’t make sent to move to Liberty right now. Transformation Advisor will also provide you with the migration bundle that you can use to kick start that modernization process.
here we are in ta i've gone ahead and created a workspace already
the two things that i want to focus on
when it comes to TAa is first how is that the data collected from the environment
and what sort of reports and recommendations Transformation Advisor provides
so for the first part, getting that info about the environment:
it's super simple and super straightforward. All you need to do is just go ahead and download the data collector and then based on your operating system you can choose whatever that is, download it and extract then install it.
Next, based on your application server (whether that's websphere or jboss or etc ) Transformation advisor ta will give you the command to run in your command line which will begin to extract those details about your environment. Such as, the number of applications you have, the types of applications, the technologies that they use etc
so that's that's how TA collects the data. it's super simple super straightforward
so that's that's how TA collects the data. it's super simple super straightforward. After the data is collected you upload the zip file.
In this workspace you can see I’ve uploaded data about one of my environments
In this environment we have a couple of applications running on WAS ND version7 and we want to migrate them to Liberty.
Transformation Advisor shows us all of our applications, the complexity of moving those applications, and then with those complexities the different issues that we have to address
some of them are optional, but some of them are major ones. It also show the estimated depth cost that would be required for migration to liberty.
so let's take a look at one of these. Let's go with the day trader application
Transformation Advisor determines the level of complexity. In this
there are technology issues that need to be
addressed for our application to run efficiently on liberty.
TA will actually tell you the line number and and the specific file where the technology issue is occurring
We can scroll down to see three reports: Technology Report, Inventory Report, Analysis REport
. First we’ll view the technology report which
lists all the different technologies within this specific application and whether they're
compatible with which editions of websphere
The inventory report gives a breakdown of what our application is actually made
of, it shows the different files such as the war files, ear files, the different technologies like
the jsps and servlets etc
then last, but probably the most important report is this analysis report
This is a report you can actually go ahead and export and hand over to your developers so they can see the different rules that Transformation Advisor has flagged what is preventing the migration of this application to liberty.
Transformation Advisor (TA) will actually guide you
and give you some help as to how to tackle the specific issues that are obstacles to your migration. Your developers can go through this report, they may also see some warnings that aren’t necessarily required for the application to move to liberty, but would be good to consider.
Once we’ve decided that we want to modernize this day trader application: Now how do i get started ?
We can go ahead and view this migration plan. This will essentially be a bundle of of files: liberty server configuration file, maven file, operator resources which are kubernetes yaml files and docker file to containerize the application
We can download these and then all we essentially need to do is make those changes that are stated in the analysis report right and then go ahead and use these files to containerize and deploy this application to openshift
That's essentially it for Transformation Advisor, it's a really valuable tool
Modernization of your WAS applications may seem like an extremely hard and daunting task. Having a tool like Transformation Advisor in your corner, is incredibly useful to help kickstart your efforts.
Line number and File name where changes are needed.