The challenges - Migrating legacy / monolithic applications on EKS

Most organisations have on-premises applications burdened with high capital expenses, complex management, scalability challenges, and hardware that needs to be replaced every 3-5 years. Maintaining existing on-premises infrastructure results in increased operational burden and drains IT budgets for businesses already budget and resource strapped.

With these on-premises challenges, enterprise IT organisations want to move to the cloud and Kubernetes has become the standard way for companies to run modern applications at scale. However, businesses looking to modernise applications often find themselves unsure how to start while asking questions like:

• Can we migrate our legacy / monolithic applications to Kubernetes?
• Should we break our workloads to micro-services before migrating Kubernetes?
• What do we need to get started with micro-services?

The solution - Lift and Shift to EKS

Based on our experience working with customers, the fastest way to modernise existing applications is to first migrate to Kubernetes on a lift-and-shift approach.

Lift-and-shift is the process of migrating a workload from on premise to AWS with little or no modification. A lift-and-shift is a common route for enterprises to move to the cloud, and can be a transitional state to a more cloud native approach. Once the application is up and running on Kubernetes, modernisation can start.

The best way to use Kubernetes on AWS is EKS. The Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that allows businesses to run and scale Kubernetes clusters in a trusted and cost-effective way.

The results - Customers implementing the CloudHero solution

EKS combined with open-source technologies have helped bootstrap our customers modernization efforts in the cloud. Here are some of our projects, where all deployments, infrastructure and code were powered by Terraform and Helm.

• Waydev - They successfully leverage EKS and KEDA for their highly autoscalable processing pipelines.
• Otter - Their highly successful eCommerce stores are powered by Magento deployed on EKS. They also benefit from Istio for its advanced traffic routing capabilities as well as Argo Workflows for reindexing jobs.
• Raffall - One of UK’s rising start-ups in the gambling industry benefit highly from EKS’ autoscaling capabilities and AWS’ security services. They also use Argo Workflows for their CI/CD pipelines, which provides a highly-scalable and fault tolerant Git-agnostic setup.

Key activities - 4 steps to migrate to Lift and Shift EKS

1. Assess - up to 1 month

A CloudHero engineer will use specialized tools to generate Dockerfiles and Helm charts for you applications, as well as right-size the target infrastructure based on current usage. In this phase, CloudHero will also build a migration plan suited for your workloads taking into account:

• Tenancy
• SLA
• Security Requirements
• Networking Requirements
• Storage Requirements

2. Mobilize - up to 1 month

After deploying the target infrastructure at a smaller scale, CloudHero engineers will build PoCs with the actual application and staging data. CloudHero will then demo AWS and EKS capabilities in order to provide operational readiness for you engineers.

3. Migrate - up to 6 months

CloudHero will upscale the infrastructure and migrate everything taking customer downtime requirements into account while moving data. When everything is ready, traffic is shifted to AWS.

4. Handover- up to 2 weeks

• CloudHero will provide documentation as well as handover sessions in order to empower you to take control of your infrastructure. Deliverables are:
• Infrastructure Code
• Infrastructure Documentation
• Runbooks

Customer contribution

1. Access. The customer will provide access to CloudHero engineers on their current platform, as well as their AWS account for the duration of the engagement.
2. Synchronization calls. The customer will provide a point of contact to CloudHero that has a deep understanding of how the applications work. This contact will be in constant contact with the CloudHero engineers, as well as participate in video calls whenever necessary.
3. Sign-off. Review deliverables as well as participate in handover meetings with the CloudHero engineers to learn on how to operate the final solution.