Modernizing your applications

You can improve the time-to-market for updates and new applications by modernizing your existing WebSphere® Application Server topologies. Modernizing your applications involves a better deployment model (DevOps), enhanced tools, and modern architectures that take advantage of thriving open source communities.

The best place to start to modernize your applications is by using Transformation Advisor. Transformation Advisor scans your existing topologies and provides a detailed report that categorizes your applications ability to move into Liberty as simple, moderate or complex.

Simple

Simple workloads do not have any dependencies on traditional WebSphere Application Server APIs and are ready to be moved into a WebSphere Liberty container with minimal effort. This option provides the most benefits as you can take advantage of orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes and tremendously improve your DevOps strategy by using containers as the unit of deployment.

Moderate

Moderate workloads contain some proprietary traditional WebSphere Application Server APIs or deprecated APIs that are no longer supported in Liberty. Two options exist for this scenario.

Move to Liberty containers. If a suitable replacement API can be used from WebSphere Liberty (for example, JAX-RS instead of JAX-RPC) then you should move to Liberty containers. You will need to refactor some code, but you will have an application that can run as native in a modern container orchestration framework.
Move to traditional WebSphere Application Server base containers. If you cannot change the application code, but are able to replace Network Deployment's Qualities-of-Service (QoS) with a container orchestration framework such as Kubernetes, then you can use IBM's traditional WebSphere Application Server base containers. You can pull a development-version from IBM Cloud Container Registry or build your own production-version container. For more information, see Running WebSphere Application Server in a container.

Complex

Complex workloads rely heavily on traditional WebSphere Application Server APIs and/or Network Deployment's QoS. However, you can still move these workloads into a cloud environment that is side by side with your cloud native applications (with your simple and moderate modernized applications), by using a framework that can quickly provision new traditional WebSphere Application Server topologies.

You can choose between the public cloud service or the private cloud service. Both options allow these existing environments to start taking advantages of integrated logging and monitoring so that you can view all of your applications within the same dashboards. Viewing within the same dashboards aids in setting up migrating environments as you can see significant savings in setup and DevOps activities.