Beyond Lift and Shift - Containerizing Monolithic Apps

You can take a LAMP app and break it down into a set of containerized components. However, that's not enough.

Do you want to frustrate a Kubernetes platform engineer? Ask them how you SSH to a container running an application daemon. One of the lessons I’ve learned here at Kubecon furthers our research around application modernization. Yes, some tools will assess an application and provide a migration path for cloud-native components.

The importance of application operations was highlighted in a conversation with Gestalt IT Publisher Stephen Foskett. Foskett shared how he installed instances of WordPress for each of the websites he manages. If a site is compromised with malware, Foskett downs the container and restarts the WordPress instance.

What would have happened if he had installed a multi-tenant instance of WordPress? He’d have to do the equivalent of “SSH’ing” into the WordPress daemon. You end up with all the overhead of containers without any operational advantages.

Modernization without process change has limited to little value.