Use cases and migration paths for Migration Toolkit for Applications

Application inventory

Application inventory is the entry point or all tools within the migration toolkit for applications. It enables organizations to manage their migration portfolio in a centralized fashion, classifying applications and launching related actions, such as analysis and assessments.

The application inventory uses an extensible tagging model that classifies applications across multiple dimensions. It includes curated tags related to development aspects like programming languages, operating systems, and databases. Users can add tags for concepts like custom corporate frameworks.

Users can group applications by the business service they belong to and manage dependencies between applications using the application inventory.

Assessment

The assessment module helps organizations evaluate their application portfolio to determine the suitability of containerization and enable adoption leads to make informed decisions on the migration strategy for each application or application type. This is achieved via a questionnaire-driven approach, covering all essential topics related to technology and application lifecycle management.

Based on the responses, the tool can detect any potential risks that might prevent an application from running in containers, providing insight to help the project lead select the best migration strategy for each case. The adoption team can also add information about the estimated effort to migrate the application and assign priority based on the business criticality.

The migration waves module enables project managers and architects to break the portfolio into different waves and execute the adoption effort in an iterative fashion, grouping applications to be migrated on a specified schedule. In combination with the integration with Atlassian Jira, Migration waves can also be used to keep track of the progress of the overall migration project.

Analysis module’s migration paths

The analysis module in the migration toolkit for applications is an extensible and customizable rule-based capability that simplifies the migration and modernization of Java or other applications.

The tool examines application artifacts, including project source directories and application archives, and produces an HTML report highlighting any needed code changes.

Deployment assets generation 

To replatform applications with automation, Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications connects to the source platform to identify what applications are on it, extracts deployment and runtime information, and then uses this information to generate deployment artifacts to run the application on Red Hat OpenShift. Generated deployment assets are placed in a target repository to simplify deployment through CI/CD pipelines, significantly reducing manual work.

Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications 8.0 supports Cloud Foundry to Red Hat OpenShift for this capability. 

Automated code transformation

Developer Lightspeed, an add-on feature for Migration Toolkit for applications, learns from previous modernization projects within an organization. It can be trained on a representative sample of changes needed for a few applications, allowing it to more accurately predict and generate the changes required for an entire application portfolio. 

By combining this learning with large language models that have extensive knowledge of technologies such as Java, Developer Lightspeed for MTA can accelerate the modernization process, helping organizations reach their modernization goals faster and at scale.