Accenture migrated its applications from virtual machines to Windows containers on Microsoft's Azure Service Fabric platform. Accenture's IT team developed tools and processes to assess applications, prepare developer workstations, and automate the migration process. This allowed application teams to independently migrate applications to containers to reduce hosting costs and manage infrastructure. The containerization effort established reusable patterns that Accenture can apply to future migrations to containers on Microsoft or other platforms.

1. TAKING WINDOWS
CONTAINERS TO
ENTERPRISE
LEVEL
Accenture furthers “living in the cloud” by
establishing reusable patterns to migrate
our applications running in virtual
machines to cloud containers.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

2. Moving IT infrastructure to the cloud is
essential to being successfully positioned to
use today’s new technologies. Accenture
identified this opportunity several years ago
when we undertook a migration of our IT
infrastructure from on-premise to today
having 95% of our IT infrastructure operating
in the public cloud. We are now “living in the
cloud” by executing various strategies.
Our global IT organization recognizes further opportunities
and business value stand to be gained through continued
transformation primarily focused on adopting platform-as-a-
service (PaaS) offerings for Accenture applications. The
objective is to ultimately have the flexibility and mobility to
select the best cloud services from across cloud service
providers. One initiative is containerization—steadily moving
Accenture’s services on virtual machines to an Azure Service
Fabric platform in collaboration with Microsoft.
CHALLENGE
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

3. WHAT ACCENTURE DID
Our global IT team selected
Azure Service Fabric as the best-
suited container platform for
Accenture’s applications running
on Windows servers. The team
then explored how to stand up
the platform, secure it, and
enable monitoring and logging
for application teams. From
there, they needed to determine
the effort and criteria for moving
applications from virtual
machines to containers and pilot
with a set of applications.
Accenture is applying the New now by
having participated among the first
enterprise customer partners with
Microsoft to migrate Accenture
applications to Azure Service Fabric at
scale. Azure Service Fabric is a
distributed systems platform that makes it
easy to package, deploy, and manage
scalable and reliable microservices and
containers. For Accenture, a key
component of living in the cloud involves
moving to a container platform. Doing so
also offers anticipated benefits of reduced
hosting costs, increased application
security, and disengagement from
managing infrastructure.
The migration effort involved developing
new assets and additional security on top
of Azure Service Fabric to better suit the
enterprise and to meet our information
security requirements.
It also involved building an end-to-end,
self-service migration service for
application teams that would make it easy
for these teams to migrate at mass on
their own. We developed assets for
evaluating the ease of moving to
containers, securing containers from build
to deployed, monitoring containers,
monitoring the container platform, and
automating the upgrade process of the
container platform.
Given that no pattern for deployment of
internal applications into containers
existed, our team developed an
automated deployment model leveraging
our global IT’s standard deployment tool.
This enabled global IT to keep the
learning curve for the application teams
low. The pilot migrations were
successfully conducted, with lessons
learned applied to fine-tune the migration
service approach.Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

4. PEOPLE AND
CULTURE
Accenture is applying the New now by having participated
among the first enterprise customer partners with Microsoft to
migrate Accenture applications to Azure Service Fabric at
scale. Accenture IT teams are enabled to migrate applications
to containers through the aid of an end-to-end solution made
up of a full complement of assets. Empowering teams to
adopt containers allows Accenture to change the experience
for application developers, and helps to mature our
DevSecOps delivery.
Lessons Accenture learned during this journey include:
• Provide an automated assessment tool for identifying what
code needs to be remediated to be able to migrate an
application.
• Have a pre-determined plan developed as to how
application teams can achieve containerization.
• Provide an automated tool for preparing a developer
workstation for working with containers locally.Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

5. VALUE
DELIVEREDToday, Accenture is in production with Azure Service Fabric, and
application teams are enabled to migrate to containers. They are aided
by an end-to-end solution made up of a full complement of assets,
including templates, guidelines, automated activities and
documentation.
Migrating applications into production on the Azure Service Fabric platform is
a foundation to Accenture living in the cloud. Empowering teams to adopt
containers allows Accenture to change the experience for application
developers, and helps to mature our DevSecOps delivery. Containerization of
legacy applications addresses the significant challenges of re-architecting to
be cloud-native applications.
Using Service Fabric supports Accenture’s strategy of moving away from
performing server maintenance activities and reducing hosting costs. Service
Fabric provides comprehensive application management capabilities to
provision, deploy, monitor, upgrade/patch, and delete deployed applications
including containerized services.
Accenture’s containerization journey with Service Fabric is the establishment
of a reusable pattern for container development, build, and security.
Accenture’s future work with containers, whether it be Microsoft or other
platforms, can follow the same pattern established with this effort.
“To live in the cloud, we wanted to get out
of the business of managing infrastructure
and get into the business of managing
business expectations.”
— Suhas Vinod Sane, Managing Director,
Enterprise Architecture
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

6. ABOUT
ACCENTURE
Accenture is a leading global professional services
company, providing a broad range of services in strategy
and consulting, interactive, technology and operations,
with digital capabilities across all of these services. We
combine unmatched experience and specialized
capabilities across more than 40 industries — powered
by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology
and Intelligent Operations centers. With 509,000 people
serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture
brings continuous innovation to help clients improve
their performance and create lasting value across their
enterprises. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved