Modernizing Stateless Applications from Any Container Platform to AWS with Matilda Cloud

By Charles Russel, Enterprise Presales Engineer – Matilda Cloud
By Suresh Reddy, Pradeep Ashwathanarayan, Nagendra Kommireddy, Cloud Solution Architects – Matilda Cloud
By Paul Gordon, Sr. Technical Writer – Matilda Cloud
By Erico Penna, Migration Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Matilda

Modernizing applications from on-premises containers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be a time-consuming task for application development and cloud infrastructure teams. Despite the challenges, it’s essential for organizations to embrace application modernization to enable scalability, uptime, and efficiency while competing in today’s digital landscape.

Stateless application modernization is an especially tedious and error-prone process, especially when applications need to be moved from one container platform to another. Stateless applications present additional challenges due to their unique architecture and design, meaning they operate handling transactions as if from scratch each time.

Stateless applications have no persistent storage and rely solely on external services for information retrieval and processing requests from users. As such, modernizing stateless apps requires careful consideration in terms of configuration management, scalability, performance optimization, security best practices and more.

In this post, we will show how cloud architects and DevOps engineers are turning to Matilda Cloud to help modernize stateless apps. Matilda Cloud’s automated tools accelerate the modernization process with powerful discovery and automated infrastructure as code tools.

Matilda is an AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partner that accelerates application migration to AWS, while also automatically modernizing the apps.

Dependencies and Decomposition

It’s no simple task to modernize stateless applications. When it comes to breaking down monolithic environments into functions, you need to know the actual dependencies from within the services layer to the dependencies within the container level.

Some of these components may be able to be decomposed, but a lot of thought needs to be given into how each of those components are decomposed. It’s like studying a living plant and trying to recreate a single part of it without the whole organism. The single component is dependent on the entire system.

Plants also need the right amounts of water, oxygen, and sunlight. For functions, it’s not that different—each function relies on the correct configuration to survive.

Matilda’s Discover module provides automated deep-dive discovery that builds dependency mapping of both the network layer and application layer (inside of the container).

Matilda Cloud’s Migrate feature enables you to repeat modernization tasks at scale for hundreds of applications. You can also accelerate the adoption of infrastructure as code (IaC) in cloud ops and DevOps processes to achieve successful migration and operational excellence at scale.

Modernization with Matilda Cloud

Matilda Cloud’s solutions make the entire modernization process easier while adhering strictly to all standards set out by AWS. Matilda’s tools provide automation to simplify cloud deployments so your team can focus on developing new features instead of managing complex infrastructures.

With Matilda Cloud’s automated tools at your disposal, modernizing existing apps will become easier and enable faster deployment cycles while keeping costs low.

Matilda Cloud’s platform supports modernization by:

• Discovering all active and inactive applications in your environment.
• Determining the complete execution environment of each application.
• Determining all components and dependencies for each application, including dependencies upon hardware and software infrastructure and other applications.
• Determining the resource requirements for each application, including CPU, disk, and utilization peaks, averages, and minimums across all monitored resources.
• Automatically producing a customizable template for each application that contains the complete IaC blueprint for how it’s provisioned in the cloud.
• Providing end-to-end orchestration with a single-click approach for migrating applications from any container platform such as Docker or Kubernetes clusters onto AWS container services quickly and securely, without disruption or downtime during the transition period.
• Real-time cloud asset recommendations provide visibility into application performance metrics, which provide quick and easy root cause and application issue identification and right-sizing verification for applications running on Kubernetes.
• Matilda Cloud offers services-level configurations for CPU, memory, service dependency analysis, node group optimization, container and pod-level optimization, and pod density analysis.

Matilda Cloud solves the challenges of modernization and migration first by automating the discovery and profiling processes, and then by simplifying the modernization and migration of applications without sacrificing application performance or scalability in production environments.

Its cloud-native approach uses serverless computing technology so there is no need for manual configuration changes or costly downtime during migrations; instead, it quickly adapts existing infrastructure into a modernized environment with little effort required by IT staff.

Matilda Cloud enables the modernization of stateless applications from any container platform—such as Kubernetes—to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).

Matilda allows you to easily spin up all artifacts in the EKS cluster setup, including AWS Fargate, Amazon EKS node groups, Amazon ECS capacity providers, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, and more. Resources can also be customizable based on your requirements. It does this at-scale with minimal disruption and effort from DevOps teams while reducing modernization complexity.

Additionally, Matilda makes sure all security postures remain intact while managing data privacy compliance requirements throughout each stage of development—something which would otherwise require tedious workarounds if done manually.

Matilda Cloud understands how essential it is that security best practices like the AWS Well-Architected Framework are established prior to migration, and provides measures to ensure authentication, authorization, and encryption policies are adhered to. With proper security postures set up beforehand, there is less chance of potential threats and vulnerabilities during modernization.

All of these features make it easy to take advantage of modern technologies like containers without compromising their current infrastructures. This allows teams to focus on more pressing tasks within their organization’s digital transformation journey.

Application Discovery for Modernization

Profiling and discovery are vital first steps in understanding the container manifest and configuring all current and on-premises installs. Matilda Discover maps out all of your application components within each name space running in your cluster, along with any external dependencies that need to be accounted for when migrating to AWS.

To support profiling and discovery, Matilda Cloud offers built-in analytics to provide visibility into how workloads are performing post modernization. This way, you know exactly what needs attention before problems arise in production environments down the line.

Matilda’s Discover module is an automated discovery tool that discovers applications, services, and infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud. It discovers infrastructure, network traffic, storage information, services, applications, and databases, and can identify end of life and dormant applications.

Discover is an agentless solution that runs in the background, observing your environment to produce the rich insights required for migration and modernization.

Figure 1 – Matilda Cloud automation.

Modernization Automation

Once you have completed profiling and discovery, it’s important to create an automated pipeline for deployment so you don’t have manual processes slowing down development cycles. Doing so helps ensure smoother deployments across environments while allowing more reliable rollbacks, if needed.

This is where Matilda’s Migrate module comes in. It automates critical steps in the modernization and migration of your existing on-premises workloads to hybrid or cloud environments by automatically generating Terraform infrastructure as code for your applications.

Users can easily push applications to the cloud, optimize ongoing cloud costs with intelligent scaling, and minimize business risks from security exposures by adhering to the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Migrate is a fast and easy solution, setting up the necessary virtual resources in minutes and managing deployments in AWS. Based on your requirements, Migrate provides templates that can be customized for each application. This includes out-of-the-box plugins that can be used and customized to manage migration according to specific customer needs, thereby accelerating your workflows.

Matilda Migrate automates and accelerates common modernization and migration scenarios in a methodical and cost-effective way.

Figure 2 – Matilda Migrate’s workflow mapping.

Power of Automation in Modernization

The modernization process also requires an in-depth knowledge of both the current application state and how Amazon EKS and/or Amazon ECS works. To create AWS infrastructure for either platform, manual mapping and building each component for applications using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, best practices, as well as Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks are all necessary.

These steps can be time consuming without Matilda Cloud’s automated approach to discovery, migration, and modernization. Matilda’s in-depth discovery and template tools provide automated support for these vital steps.

The problem with manually creating these components is that it’s prone to human errors and not feasible to scale. Additionally, it does not enable any sort of workflow that would allow you to repeat processes multiple times over many different applications.

Automation is an essential best practice in modernization that helps reduce manual effort involved in the transition process while ensuring accuracy across all stages of development lifecycle management—from code deployment through testing into production environments. Matilda Cloud offers best-in-class automated solutions to simplify application modernization.

Summary

Matilda Cloud’s automated platform supports the modernization of stateless applications by utilizing deep profiling and discovery and automated migration tools. These tools are essential in ensuring a smooth and efficient transition to modern systems, reducing the risk of data loss and downtime.

Matilda Cloud’s modern platform allows organizations to stay ahead of the competition, unlocking new levels of efficiency within their IT infrastructure and driving a smooth transition to AWS.

Watch a demo of Matilda Cloud’s Migrate and Discover modules and see the platform’s powerful capabilities for modernizing stateless applications firsthand.

.

.

Matilda – AWS Partner Spotlight

Matilda is an AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partner that accelerates application migration to AWS, while also automatically modernizing the apps.

Contact Matilda | Partner Overview