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Cloudification isn’t just for new applications anymore
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Enterprises say they’re getting promised benefits such as improved security, reliability, and scalability
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Red Hat introduced a half-dozen Kubernetes utilities to help enterprises achieve and maintain application cloudification
Until recently, enterprises have used the cloud for new applications while protecting critical apps by running them on proven legacy on-premises architectures. But that’s changing, according to a report released Tuesday by Red Hat in partnership with research firm Illuminas.
The report found enterprises are finally focused on cloudifying their most valuable critical applications – and judging from the product updates it released at KubeCon this week, Red Hat is eager to help them do it.
Illuminas interviewed 1,000 IT decision-makers, back-end developers and software architects from large and medium-sized enterprises in the U.S., U.K. and English-speaking Asia-Pacific for the report in October and November 2023. The study was a follow-up to 2021 research.
What changed in three years? Enterprises are placing “greater emphasis on updating legacy applications and infrastructure over building new cloud applications,” according to the report authored by Gorden Haff, a technology advocate at Red Hat.
In other words, traditional enterprises are finally moving bet-the-business core applications to the cloud.
Reaping rewards
And they’re reaping rewards in the form of enhanced security, reliability and scalability. Nearly all respondents say they experienced benefits in at least one of those critical areas, according to the report.
Improving continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) pipelines is a priority for 68% of respondents. That’s a change from 2021, when containerizing workloads was the top priority, and CI/CD was at the bottom. The result “serves as a useful reminder that not everyone is on the cutting edge,” Haff wrote. The finding is a reminder that routine practices for advanced practitioners are often struggles for beginners.
And what happens to the old applications? Enterprises are still figuring out what to do with the applications they’re modernizing over the next two years, according to the study.
The most common plan, cited by 20% of respondents, is to replatform the applications, optimizing “while migrating to the new platform to cloud-enable applications without changing core application code or architecture (sometimes referred to as ‘tweak, lift and shift’),” according to the report.
Other options, selected by 10-19% of respondents each, include:
- Retire: Sunset or decommission applications that are no longer needed
- Retain: Leave critical applications as-is until refactoring is required
- Rehost: “Lift-and-shift” applications to a cloud (hosted or on-premise) without architectural changes
- Refactor: Re-architect as cloud-native, for example, by containerizing workloads or moving them to a serverless architecture
- Repurchase: Move from perpetual licenses to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model
Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a big role in application modernization. More than 75% of organizations surveyed use AI to support application modernization.
Red Hat's role
Enterprise priorities are core to Red Hat’s strategy, as reflected in product updates released at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 conference in Paris this week, Stu Miniman, Red Hat senior director of market insights, told Silverlinings.
The company released Red Hat OpenShift 4.15, supporting AWS Outposts and AWS Wavelength Zones, new resilience and disaster recovery capabilities for OpenShift Virtualization, and unified monitoring.
“CI/CD is core to OpenShift,” Miniman said. “You can’t just lift and shift—that’s not the way to do things.” Instead, enterprises need to modernize application components and prioritize bringing new capabilities to the cloud.
All told, Red Hat introduced nine new products and upgrades this week. In addition to the OpenShift upgrade, it is bringing Testcontainers to OpenShift to streamline building and testing software with real dependencies; introducing Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes 4.4, with new vulnerability scanning; updating the Quay 3.11 private container registry, with improved permission management and lifecycle automation; re-introducing the Red Hat Universal Base Image for building containerized applications; and debuting Podman Desktop 1.8 for managing applications, with advanced controls and greater ease-of-use.
“Red Hat holds a formidable market position and capitalizes on VMware’s uncertainty after the Broadcom acquisition,” IDC analyst Jim Mercer told Silverlinings. “You see this with the increased investments in OpenShift Virtualization and increased support for the edge with Red Hat Device Edge, the lightweight Microshift Kubernetes distribution, AWS Outposts and Wavelength Zones.”
Testcontainers support will be particularly appealing to organizations deploying internal developer platforms, which some 80% of organizations are doing, according to IDC research, Mercer said.