HyperForm Accelerating Application Migration to Microsoft Azure
Cloud adoption is one of the fastest growing trends in IT, bringing tremendous benefits to users. Most enterprises however still spend significant time and resources managing their legacy applications.
Legacy applications and architectures are more cumbersome and costlier to maintain than their cloud native counterparts; however, these applications cannot be abandoned as they are core to the business. This poses a challenge for many organizations who are looking to modernize legacy applications to remove infrastructure dependencies and take full advantage of the scale and performance of the cloud.
For many IT organizations that inherit legacy applications without any documentation or in-depth knowledge about the application dependencies, the task of modernizing these applications while avoiding code changes becomes overwhelming. HyperForm drives business innovation by modernizing existing legacy applications without making a single code change, using the existing skill sets within an organization.
HyperForm can accelerate the migration of legacy applications to containers. Compared to virtual machines, containers are much more lightweight as they eliminate the need for a guest operating system that requires more storage overhead and a longer time to boot up. As a result, developers use containers to hyperdrive DevOps and speed up continuous delivery into production.
For the most part, new applications leveraging microservices can take full advantage of containers. This means that legacy applications that were never architected for containers are left out in the cold. Even “tweaking” them to support containers is a major undertaking. But, if it is possible to adapt them for containers, they could certainly benefit from it.
HyperForm addresses two main challenges around containers.
- Containerizing existing legacy apps without making a single code change and using the existing skill sets within an organization. The on-the-fly containerization capabilities allow users to “lift and shift” existing Java and .NET applications to containers while taking care of the complex application dependencies, automatic service discovery, auto-scaling and integration with any external service (e.g. storage, networking, logging, etc.). HyperForm transforms non-cloud-native legacy applications into completely portable applications that can take advantage of auto scaling and deployment agility on Microsoft Azure or any other cloud.
- Manage the IT operations needed to run applications in production. This includes persistent storage, security and threat detection, network isolation and segmentation, scalability, monitoring, updates and troubleshooting. Unlike other management platforms, HyperForm leverages the open-source Docker standards for provisioning machines and applications (i.e. Docker Machine and Docker Compose) providing users the broad freedom to use any orchestration engine for deployment. For external systems that may not have official Docker drivers yet (e.g. storage, logging, etc.), HyperForm provides on-the-fly integration using extensible plug-ins that can be written in BASH, PowerShell, Perl, Python or Ruby, and that can be invoked at more than 15 different lifecycle states.
Migrating existing applications to Microsoft Azure can be achieved by completing three simple steps.