​Move your ANY OpenShift or Kubernetes based applications to IBM Cloud

IBM cloud provides users a fast and secure way to containerize and deploy applications with IBM OpenShift and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. With a variety of storage available on the cloud, users can choose one that suits their needs. If you want to migrate your containerized application to the IBM OpenShift cluster or IBM Kubernetes cluster, RackWare SWIFT is the solution.

RackWare SWIFT is RackWare’s migration and disaster-recovery solution for containerized workloads running on any platform including the following:

  • Oracle (OKE)

  • Azure (AKS)

  • Google (GKE)

  • AWS (EKS)

  • IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

  • OpenShift

Let us get started:

In this article we will explore two use cases where SWIFT can be used to migrate workloads into the IBM cloud:

  • Migration to IBM OpenShift Cluster

  • Migration to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster

Moving workloads to IBM OpenShift cluster

For this blog, we will migrate Jenkins – an open-source automation server application hosted on AWS OpenShift Origin (OKD) cluster to IBM OCP (OpenShift Container Platform) cluster running on VPC Gen2 Infrastructure.

You can use SWIFT to migrate the application in two simple steps:

  • Add source and target clusters to SWIFT

  • Start the replication

Step1: Add source and target clusters to the SWIFT

To add clusters to SWIFT, go to the ‘Container Clusters’ option on the left sidebar and click on the ‘Add’ button.

Let us add the AWS OKD cluster to the SWIFT by entering the AWS cloud credentials like below and click on the ‘Add’ button.

Similarly, let us add the IBM OpenShift cluster to SWIFT.

SWIFT supports both flavors of OpenShift on IBM:

  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP)

  • OpenShift Origin (OKD)

Select the ‘Cloud Type’ accordingly.

After the clusters are added, SWIFT shows the summary of the clusters. You can expand any of the clusters to list all the information that SWIFT has discovered.

Step 2: Start the replication

  1. Navigate to the sidebar menu and select the ‘Sync Administration’-> ‘All Replications’ option. To start a new replication, select the ‘New’ button.

  2. SWIFT supports application replication as well as container image replication. For the current use case, select ‘Application Replication.’

  3. You can select one of the following sync types based on your use case:

    -Passthrough Sync: For migration

    -Staged Sync (Stage1+Stage2): For DR

    -For the blog’s use case of migration, let us select the ‘Passthrough’ sync type.

  4. Now, let us provide the source and the target cluster details for migration.

  5. You can select any storage supported by the target IBM cluster for your replicated application.

  6. Specify the rest of the details as shown in the below picture and click on the ‘Add’ button to start the replication.

  • After the replication is complete, a notification will be displayed, and you will be able to see the operation progress checkpoints, sync statistics on expanding the replication job.

  • Since the replication is now complete, you can go to the IBM OpenShift cluster’s console to access the newly replicated application.

Moving workloads to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster

The steps for migration to IBM Cloud Kubernetes are the same as the above. The only difference here is that you need to select ‘Kubernetes’ as a platform type while adding the IBM cluster.

Conclusion:

In this way, you can use SWIFT to easily move your containerized workloads from ANY container platform, version, and cloud to IBM cloud. SWIFT supports fully automated application customization, storage conversions, volume resizing and lets you sit back and relax while SWIFT does the work for you.

For more details, click here. You can contact us here or email us at [email protected] for any queries and demo requests.

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