Chapter 1. Introduction

This guide is for engineers, consultants, and others who want to use the Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) to migrate Java applications or other components. It describes how to install and run the Maven plugin, review the generated reports, and take advantage of additional features.

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 questionnaire as 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:

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.

The Maven plugin for the Migration Toolkit for Applications integrates into the Maven build process, allowing developers to continuously evaluate migration and modernization efforts with each iteration of source code. It provides numerous reports that highlight the analysis results, and is designed for developers who want updates with each build.