Slides for the presentation that I gave at DockerCon 2017 in Austin. The slot was rather short (20 minutes) and there wasn't a whole lot of time to dive into details, but I try to describe the main IT/business drivers that we've observed around container migration, our methodology for doing migrations in a structured manner, and then dive into some very practical topics based on existing migration exprience with Docker Datacenter Enteprise Edition.

1. Containers aren’t just for
microservices –
Containerizing Legacy
Workloads

2. Oscar Renalias
Senior Technology Architect
@oscarrenalias
github.com/oscarrenalias
github.com/Accenture
oscar.renalias@accenture.com

3. Driven by business needs for higher speed, flexibility and infrastructure cost
reductions, enterprises are turning towards container-based infrastructures to
support their wide variety of workloads
DRIVERS
• Speed
• Agility
• Flexibility
• Cost
• Scale
• Resiliency
ENABLERS
Cloud DevOps
CONTAINERS
MODERN APP ARCHITECTURES
LEGACY WORKLOADS

4. Why containers – IT Value
Benefit
Container
Benefits
Infrastructure
DevOps
Architecture
License savings
Hardware savings
Flexible platforms
Predictability
Flexible application
environments
Efficiency
Modern architectures
Developer Productivity
$$$
⭐ ⭐
$$$
$
$$
$$$
⭐
⭐ ⭐ ⭐

5. Why containers – Business Value
SPEED TO MARKET
Allow business
organizations to rapidly
get their applications to
mark
JOURNEY TO CLOUD
Accelerate the journey to
cloud, using containers
COMPLIANCE
Control the entire software
lifecycle; assess what runs
where, by whom, what is
packaged inside a container
and apply policies to control
runtime access

6. Legacy workload migration in the real
world

7. Cloud Container Migration in the real world
Run all platforms, legacy or
otherwise, on the same robust
and scalable platform, and
increase/decrease capacity as
needed, e.g. to create more
development or testing
environments when needed
FLEXIBILITY
35-50% cost reduction on
infrastructure and software
licenses expected to be
realized after completing
the migration
COST REDUCTION
Integrate containerized
applications with the
client’s DevOps tooling,
and enable capabilities
such as deployment
automation that would not
have been possible earlier
MODERNIZED APP
LIFECYCLE

8. Docker EE Architecture
Docker Datacenter CaaS
Infrastructure
Runtime
Services
Administration
Host OS Container OS
Container Engine Container Tooling
Orchestration Resource Management Service Discovery
PersistenceNetworking
Browser Application
Integrations
Containers
Data
Registry
Storage (Images)
Monitoring
DevOps
Logging
Image Build
Access Control
Log aggregation
Metrics aggregation
Monitoring, alerting
SLA reporting and
monitoring
Secrets Management
Docker Compose UCP, Swarm Overlays, HRM
Sysdig Docker Overlays Convoy DTR
S3
Docker Docker CLI
RHEL RHEL
Jenkins
Docker EE
ELK
Sysdig
Sysdig
OOTB Docker EE Components Additional components
Docker EE
Storage (Volumes)
EFS

9. Container Landscape
Docker Datacenter CaaS
Legacy Workloads
• 15000 images in DTR
• 150-200 containers on a regular
basis
• 50 nodes across prod and
non-prod clusters
• Application teams from
Accenture as well as client
partners
• Every team with its own
organization in DTR
Microservices & APIs

10. Structured container migration
QUALIFICATION ESTIMATION IMPLEMENTATION

11. Lessons learned

12. Stakeholder buy-in
• Strong project management is necessary
to coordinate all the different activities
around validation and roll-out of
containerized applications
• Application teams and owners will be
required to support
• The more legacy the application, the
more support it will require

13. Approach
Containerizing by “sucking in” a bunch
of folders and dumping them into a
containe image is feasible, but not
sustainable

14. Application Impact
The approach to
non-functional
requirements are
applied differently
in a containerized
environment – it
impacts the way
applications are
containerized
• High availability
– let UCP
handle it
• Scalability –
run more
container
instances in
parallel

15. Roadmap and evolution
Docker is evolving very fast – too fast,
or not fast enough for your needs?

16. Networking, Routing and Discovery
• Overlay networks are sufficient to support routing
and discovery within the cluster.
• Outside the cluster:
Layer 7 routing is straightforward with HRM
Layer 4 routing (e.g. JMS, RMI) is a bit more
complicated

17. Persistence? What persistence?
(some distributed filesystem)
(storage
plugin)
Docker
(storage
plugin)
Docker
(storage
plugin)
Docker

18. Cluster Upgrades
Upgrades to DTR and UCP must be
approached carefully, and can still go
wrong

19. DevOps Integration
• Integrating and automating
deployment processes for
applications that never had them is a
major productivity improvement
• Legacy applications do not always
have the needed infrastructure in
place for repeatable and automated
builds

20. Validation
Legacy code tends to be light on
tests, and that complicates validation
and assurance phases of the
containerization process

21. Operations
Traditional operational tooling
cannot currently deal with
containers; new tools are likely
going to be needed