PCF Migration Starter Kit: 4 months Migration Implementation

The GD team accumulated a lot of experience building cloud presence for its customers and distilled that knowledge into a blueprint for a microservices platform, further enhanced by addition of PCF migration automation on top to ease the move to Azure cloud.

The platform is a generic implementation which addresses the majority of questions arising when companies encounter the world of cloud and microservices for the first time. The platform is capable of hosting various workloads when deployed, without spending time on the “plumbing” work usually associated with the beginning of a cloud journey. This allows companies to focus on their business domain logic and enables quick onboarding of “clean slate” implementations as well as the easy migration of existing technical solutions from other cloud and on-premise systems to Azure.

The reference microservices platform supports multi-tenancy and high availability / disaster recovery scenarios and can be scaled on-demand. It leverages the IaaC approach, which helps with reducing operational costs and provides a unified infrastructure for all stages of development.

The PCF migration starter kit adds automation capable of scanning the existing PCF-based environments, mapping it out to Azure AKS-based infrastructure, and bringing up the end-to-end stack online, including CI/CD pipelines tasked with the deployments into freshly provisioned environments off the same codebase used for the legacy platform.

The tentative engagement plan:

Grid Dynamics will host a workshop which will cover the basic concepts of what a microservices platform is and why it’s needed, as well as architecture for the reference implementation and various components of the platform, including the PCF starter kit, the ideas of modularity and possibilities of customizations.

The workshop is expected to be followed by open discussion focusing on the Customer’s specific requirements and how the solution can be integrated into an existing technical roadmap.

After the scope and initial requirements are collected, Grid Dynamics team will perform a deep dive into systems affected by engagement, focusing on specifics of PCF-based system implementation existing at the moment, and mapping it to future Azure-based environments.

As a next step, the instance of the microservices platform will be built in the Azure subscription provided by the customer, which will incorporate customizations identified during workshop/discovery phases, and the first set of pre-identified applications migrated from PCF, deployed and handed over along with the trainings required to maintain and extend the solution if needed.

As a part of the handover process, the system is expected to pass required client validations and be certified to completely or partially (depending on the nature of applications and scope of engagement) replace the old system, which may be then planned for decommissioning.

The next steps may vary depending on the types of workloads or specific needs, but usually include continuation of onboarding for the applications combined with further enhancements and productionalization.