Driving Down Cost & Complexity: App Migration in the Cloud

Introduction

The digital transformation journey for many organizations involves migrating applications to the cloud. This process, while beneficial, can be fraught with challenges related to cost, complexity, and security. This white paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how organizations can drive down costs and simplify the complexity of app migrations to the cloud, leveraging solutions from F5.

The Pain of App Migrations

App migrations are often driven by the need for cost optimization, meeting business requirements, and responding to external factors and market pressures. However, the process can be painful due to delays in internal processes, budget constraints, and the need for secure migrations without publicly advertising the app or its API endpoints.

The app migration process can be divided into the following phases:

Plan: Determine if a lift and shift or refactor is needed and estimate the time required 3
Prepare: Assess infrastructure, ensure compliance and security requirements 4
Build: Begin migrating the application or refactoring the process
Pre-Production Testing: Test in staging environments and check for vulnerabilities
Production Testing: Run new and legacy environments in production and test for resilience
Go Live: Deploy the application to the production environment
Decommission Legacy App: Proceed with the decommissioning of the legacy app

Individuals within organizations can identify app migration opportunities by listening for key pain points such as the need to consolidate cloud applications; changes in VMware's contract terms, challenges in ongoing migrations, plans for datacenter consolidation, and timelines for new application cutovers.

Key persons looking to migrate apps are…

VP of IT: Manages IT operations and ensures systems run smoothly
Cloud Architect: Designs and implements cloud infrastructure
SecOps: Ensures the security posture of apps, focusing on threat detection, incident response, and compliance
DevOps: Ensures smooth integration between development and operations, optimizing the deployment pipeline and managing CI/CD workflows

Whether your migration is between cloud providers or on-prem, F5’s solution seamlessly ties together all the ends.

The Process: Migrating Apps with F5

Comprised of three integrated components to accelerate time to market and reduce redundancies, an F5 solution provides:

Deployable Software (CE): Abstracts multi-environment complexity
Distributed Cloud App Connect: Provides app connectivity and secure network overlay
SaaS-Console: Offers universal visibility and consistent policy enforcement

F5 Distributed Cloud Services simplify app migrations by ensuring observability, security, and compliance. End-to-end visibility is maintained throughout the migration, traffic is balanced across both environments, and consistent security policies are enforced.

CE’s, deployable to most hypervisors, virtual platforms, and most public cloud providers, deliver many L3 and L7 services and capabilities, some of which include the following:

Single dashboard view
Multi-site support
Multi-tenancy
Native service discovery
L7 load balancing
L3 firewall
L3 routing, including with BGP
Network segmentation
L3 VPN
SNAT
DHCP Server

For migrations that include RedHat OpenShift Virtualization or Nutanix AH-V, free tools are available from each to move virtual machines between environments. For OpenShift, use the Migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV), and for Nutanix, use Nutanix Move.

Regardless of the provider or platform, with an F5 XC CE at each location, re-connect the workloads on your VM’s without making any changes. Using F5 XC App Connect or Network Connect, extend L7 or L3 network services with any combination of L7 HTTP load balancing or L3 routing (and use SNAT policies only as needed).

Demo

The following video shows two migration scenarios and how using F5 XC simplifies the task. The first part covers how to migrate app VMs from a VMWare environment to one powered by RedHat OpenShift Virtualization. In the second part, I show how to use Nutanix Move to migrate VM’s between Nutanix clusters from one cloud provider to another. In both scenarios, F5 XC CE’s are configured to use App Connect to seamlessly deliver connectivity and security. This allows both migrations to happen without downtime to applications.

Video: https://youtu.be/SEuSvcyxWDU

Conclusion

Migrating applications to the cloud can be a time consuming and costly process, but with the right strategies and solutions, organizations can overcome these challenges. F5's integrated components and services provide the necessary tools to simplify migrations, ensure security, and optimize cost.