For adoption of cloud, for enterprises, there are tools which enable movement of VMs or hosts to the cloud. However, to seek the benefits of cloud, enterprises or startups need to focus on applications and not the entire infra over which the application resides. To ensure applications work post-migration, they need to be assessed on multiple parameters. These parameters include the operating system on which the application is deployed, the libraries which are accessed, third-party tools which it interfaces with, interdependencies between the applications processes, and so on.
Taking it to another level, there are two methods to discover applications, one is time-consuming than the other. One of the methods includes a manual approach to go through the existing documentation or interview folks responsible for developing that application. The other, less time-consuming, which is to automate the discovery of applications. This is where the Discover tool from CloudHedge adds significant value.
Automated Application Assessment
Application assessment is one of the important parts of the entire application modernization process. If we are unable to capture the true and in-depth behavior of the existing application, when migrated, the application will break. CloudHedge Discover captures details of applications at two levels:
- Infrastructure
- Services of applications and its dependencies
Infrastructure level details, such as network, CPU, and few more parameters, are captured over a period of time to analyze the workload patterns of the application(s). These assist in identifying the right size of instance on the cloud (private or public). We call it, phase 1 discovery.
Application X-Ray
Application X-Ray, phase 2 discovery, captures dependencies by listening to the interactions between user-level processes or services. We recommend by simply running a test which captures all use-cases of the application. It assists in capturing boundary cases and the behavior of the application. Most often, enterprises do not know what is running on the hosts along with the applications processes. At times, the CloudHedge Discover tool enables the enterprise to identify services which are not required but are installed on the host and perhaps responsible for the lower performance of the application.
Discover is an agentless tool which listens on the network and captures only metadata of the applications. It does not need access to the source code. During application X-Ray, we attach probes (it does not require to download any agent) which captures the true behavior of the application. These probes will be attached before the application X-Ray process starts and then detached once we are able to capture different behavior of the application. In addition, the tool works seamlessly with Windows IIS and Linux web apps, even if they are dating back to Windows Server 2003.
Moving on, a recommendation report is generated once the application X-Ray process is completed. It gives an exhaustive report on details captured during Phase 1 and 2 of discovery. These are technical level recommendations. We all know decisions to migrate an application cannot be taken only on technical inputs or structure of the application, it requires business users or Line of Business (LoB) managers to weigh in their insights and then decide if the said application is a good candidate for cloud or not. If it is a good candidate for cloud, the second level decision is – should it be retained (i.e. rehosted), retired or containerized.
Discover from CloudHedge
With the use of an automated application assessment tool, Discover, CloudHedge enables enterprises to discover apps within one (1) business day and brings the following benefits:
- Automatically captures Metadata of your applications and infrastructure
- Assess Linux and Windows (IIS Applications) based applications
- Analyzes the risks and dependencies involved before modernization of apps to cloud.
- Get access to actionable insights and make migration predictable and efficient.
CloudHedge would be attending Microsoft Inspire event in Las Vegas between 14th and 18th July, meet us to explore how we can help in automating the discovery of applications within hours. We have a free POC offer for Microsoft Inspire attendees, schedule a meeting today.
