PCF Migration Starter Kit: 4-hour Workshop

Grid Dynamics has distilled years of experience of building new and migrating existing workloads to the Azure cloud platform in a starter kit, which not only incorporates modern fully-configured (yet flexible) container-based microservices platform but adds additional benefits of semi-automated migration from legacy platforms built using Pivotal Cloud Foundry (now known as VMware Tanzu) while allowing work to continue on both platforms simultaneously. This can rapidly reduce migration/modernization costs, and timelines as well as reduce legacy licensing renewal risks during the migration/modernization program.

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

The platform is an Azure-native reference implementation of the blueprint 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 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 unified infrastructure for all stages of development. It provides pre-packaged yet modular and flexible ways to reduce onboarding time to the Azure cloud infrastructure for new projects from weeks to days or even hours, incorporating best practices from both Microsoft and Grid Dynamics. It can also provide a clear and easy path for modernization and future-proofing of existing workloads, making sure they are up to top industry standards.

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

Workshop agenda: Introductions Basic ideas and importance of robust and modern microservices platform How to address most commonly asked questions when building cloud presence in Azure Leveraging the best practices and technologies offered by Azure cloud Addressing the migration from PCF - how to map existing environments to Azure Live demo of starter kit performing end to end migration of reference application stack from PCF to AKS Deep dive into current areas of concern for Customer and drafting the resolution plan Closure and discussion of next steps.