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Chapter 2. About the Migration Toolkit for Applications

What is the Migration Toolkit for Applications?

Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) accelerates large-scale application modernization efforts across hybrid cloud environments on Red Hat OpenShift. This solution provides insight throughout the adoption process, at both the portfolio and application levels: inventory, assess, analyze, and manage applications for faster migration to OpenShift via the user interface.

MTA uses an extensive questionaire as the the basis for assessing your applications, enabling you to estimate the difficulty, time, and other resources needed to prepare an application for containerization. You can use the results of an assessment as the basis for discussions between stakeholders to determine which applications are good candidates for containerization, which require significant work first, and which are not suitable for containerization.

MTA analyzes applications by applying one or more rulesets to each application considered to determine which specific lines of that application must be modified before it can be modernized.

MTA examines application artifacts, including project source directories and application archives, and then produces an HTML report highlighting areas needing changes. MTA supports many migration paths including the following:

  • Upgrading to the latest release of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
  • Migrating from Oracle WebLogic or IBM WebSphere Application Server to Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
  • Containerizing applications and making them cloud-ready
  • Migrating from Java Spring Boot to Quarkus
  • Upgrading from OpenJDK 8 to OpenJDK 11
  • Upgrading from OpenJDK 11 to OpenJDK 17
  • Migrating EAP Java applicatons to Azure App Service
  • Migrating Spring Boot Java applications to Azure App Service

For more information about use cases and migration paths, see the MTA for developers web page.

How does the Migration Toolkit for Applications simplify migration?

The Migration Toolkit for Applications looks for common resources and known trouble spots when migrating applications. It provides a high-level view of the technologies used by the application.

MTA generates a detailed report evaluating a migration or modernization path. This report can help you to estimate the effort required for large-scale projects and to reduce the work involved.

2.1. MTA Features

Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) is an integrated assembly of tools that lets you better assess, prioritize and modernize your applications across hybrid cloud environments on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading Kubernetes platform.

Now designed for easier upgrades with more migration paths, MTA includes:

  • New application inventory and assessment modules that assist organizations in managing, classifying and tagging their applications while assessing application suitability for deployment in containers, including flagging potential risks for migration strategies.
  • Full integration with source code and binary repositories to automate the retrieval of applications for analysis along with proxy integration including HTTP and HTTPS proxy configuration managed in the user interface.
  • Improved analysis capabilities with new analysis modes, including source and dependency modes that parse repositories to gather dependencies and add them to the overall scope of the analysis. There is also a simplified user experience to configure the analysis scope, including open source libraries.
  • Enhanced Role-Bassed Access Control (RBAC) powered by Red Hat Single Sign-On, defining three new differentiated personas with different permissions to suit the needs of each user—administrator, architect and migrator—including credentials management for multiple credential types.
  • Administrator perspective to provide tool-wide configuration management for administrators.

2.2. About MTA rules

The Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) contains rule-based migration tools that analyze the APIs, technologies, and architectures used by the applications you plan to migrate. In fact, the MTA analysis process is implemented using MTA rules. MTA uses rules internally to extract files from archives, decompile files, scan and classify file types, analyze XML and other file content, analyze the application code, and build the reports.

MTA builds a data model based on the rule execution results and stores component data and relationships in a graph database, which can then be queried and updated as needed by the migration rules and for reporting purposes.

MTA rules use the following rule pattern:

Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap 
when(condition)
  perform(action)
otherwise(action)

MTA provides a comprehensive set of standard migration rules out-of-the-box. Because applications may contain custom libraries or components, MTA allows you to write your own rules to identify use of components or software that may not be covered by the existing ruleset.

If you plan to write your own custom rules, see the Rules Development Guide for detailed instructions.

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