Containerization for Modernizing Applications
Containers are fundamentally changing the way applications are being shipped and accessed. One of the important areas container technology has found large takers is modernization of older core applications that don’t fit DevOps strategies. Containers enable these legacy applications to be broken down into microservices that are far more agile and flexible in terms of implementation.
The lower costs and increased speed, portability and developer efficiency achievable with containers are just the beginning. When it comes to cost reductions, containers are a fraction of the size of full virtual machines and are ideal for supporting DevOps strategies as they enable faster testing and far fewer infrastructure configurations. Consequently, they have been reported to reduce dev/test costs by as much as 70 percent with as much as a 40 percent reduction in production costs.
Container technology provides more than a lift and shift and should be seen as more than just a transport mechanism. It provides the underpinnings to transition to a microservices model and introduces containers into the environment in a manageable way. That’s why it has quickly become a popular approach for familiarizing DevOps teams with containers that help in establishing quick wins for showing tangible forward motion on a container strategy.
Some key Benefits
Speed up application development and deployment: Containers are lean, light, and fast—you can easily start developing containers using readymade boilerplate images, based on popular open source projects. Once ready, you can package your work as a container image, ship it and run in a production environment the same way you did in your development environment. If you add automation to the process, like CI/CD tools, then things can even get faster.
Easy to scale and manage: This is very important and required nowadays in the IT landscape. Scaling application and required infrastructure on a timely basis and managing all at central place creates more impact on business. So, to achieve the same companies are adopting enterprise platform which provides all in one like Docker Enterprise Edition.
Choice of deployment platforms: Containers are highly portable just like the physical containers can be carried on any shipping vessel. By containerizing your apps, you are able to deploy them on an internal cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, VM environment or bare metal. This creates massive portability of application and frees developers from worrying about underlying deployment platforms. This means businesses are able to achieve faster go-to-market, cost optimization, and rapid technology adoption.

Steps towards Application Modernization:
Application modernization is a big initiative for most large organisations and it is not driven just because of technology development but it is a business need. Organisations today want to improve customer engagement, they want to reduce cost-per-customer connect, market, etc. everything at a quick speed. But, the biggest drag on the speed is the way legacy applications are built and deployed. One of the ways is to re-architect legacy app into microservices and change the way they are built. But the resources and time needed for this approach are very high and defeats the very purpose – speed of deployment. However, containerization allows you to change the way they are deployed. There is a complete methodology evolved to help organizations modernize the applications, embrace containers and reap most of the benefits stated earlier. To enable this, Modernizing Traditional Application (MTA) is such a program developed by Docker and offered by its partners such as Ashnik.
Modernizing Traditional Applications (MTA):
The MTA program is designed to help IT organizations to reduce maintenance time, cost and increase innovation ratio. This is the combination of Docker EE services and infrastructure into a single program which delivers portability, security, and efficiency for the existing applications to drive down total costs and make space for innovation like cloud strategies and new app development. The program starts with the packaging of existing apps into isolated containers, providing the opportunity to migrate them to new on-premise or cloud environments, without any recoding.

“What is the first step we should take toward microservices?”

(Docker Enterprise Edition Modernizes Apps and Infrastructure)

Through experience, it is found that, for the vast majority of them, the best answer is, “Start with what you have today – with your existing applications.”
Why is this the right place for them to start?
Because it recognizes two realities facing enterprise IT organizations today:

1. Existing applications consume 80% of IT budgets
2. Most IT organizations responsible for existing apps are also tasked with hybrid cloud initiatives.

Seeing this pattern repeatedly, Docker designed this program as a solution for IT operations teams to rapidly address both realities.
MTA process starts with considering any of your existing running monolithic/legacy application and creating docker image to run as a container of same. Once the docker image is ready with complete application stack or required components push this image on centralized location which will become easy to access for everyone who has access. So to make this process secure, reliable and efficient docker enterprise provides a feature called on-prem docker trusted registry (DTR) which is used to push and manage all docker images available for your organization and this will help to build the CI/CD pipeline. So whenever any new changes happen, Jenkins jobs will create new docker images and push them into DTR and based on the result of image scanning, security vulnerabilities decides to promote to next level of infrastructure QAT or production. In this way the very easy and first step to start with containerization for your existing application is ready and which can be deployed on any platform where docker engine exists. As a next step, you can think on or start with peeling off for other services from the monolithic code base.
ASHNIK and its Docker Certified Consultants bring this MTA program in Southeast Asia. We involve in the journey of containerization with our customers to help them to modernize whatever they have today. ASHNIK provides training on Docker Enterprise Edition and professional services on the same to build microservices based product landscape.
If you are looking to modernize your traditional applications or want to find out details about the MTA program, you can reach out to us https://ashnik.com/contact-us/