Managing today’s urgent need for digital transformation means modernizing applications to meet new requirements and supporting more containerized applications for rapid deployment and scale. In an effort to keep pace with increasing business demands and support developers and DevOps teams, IT leaders are examining their underlying infrastructures.
Is a single cloud platform that supports both VM and containerized applications the answer for your organization?
To answer this question, it’s best to start with an understanding that not every application will be modernized at the same time or in the same way. App modernization options include:
- Rehost – Some legacy applications may simply need to be migrated “as is” to benefit from the flexibility and scale of new cloud infrastructure.
- Replatform – Other VM-based apps or app components may be deployed in containers to gain the uptime and flexibility of being managed by a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes.
- Refactor – Still others will be re-written or written anew with a cloud native microservices architecture. The programming language may change, while the build, deploy and manage processes will almost certainly change.
The goal is to modernize according to business needs, with the least cost and disruption to the business. Using the same platform, tools and skills you’ve already got in place for VM architectures and adding support for containerized apps and Kubernetes seems like an optimal solution. But before moving down that path, you’ll want to answer some questions, including:
- What key infrastructure capabilities do developers need?
- What key capabilities do infrastructure operators need?
- What are the cost, risk and service quality benefits of having VMs and containers on the same platform?
- What is “developer-ready” infrastructure?
- How important is integrated and automated network, storage and namespace for containers?
VMware now offers VMware Cloud Foundation™ with VMware Tanzu™ — a single platform solution for VM and container workloads, available in your data center and multiple clouds. This full-stack solution offers something for everyone:
- For application developers, it is Kubernetes.
- For infrastructure administrators, it is VMware vSphere®.
- For the business, it is a single platform that supports application modernization now and in the future.
So, if you’re thinking about the next step in your organization’s application modernization journey and wondering how you will support containers in production at scale, you’ll want to check out Frequently Asked Questions: How to Run Virtual Machines and Container Workloads on a Single Hybrid Cloud Platform.
