Java enterprise application migration: The four pillars of success

by Brad Davis (Red Hat)

With the release of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, Red Hat successfully delivered a full JEE 6-compliant container that is both lightweight and enterprise ready. As a result, many IT leaders are actively looking to shift their application workloads away from proprietary technologies like Websphere and Weblogic to JBoss EAP.

But questions about cost, risk and starting point often stand in the way.

In response, Red Hat Consulting has developed a proven methodology, identifying four key pillars to a successful migration. Leveraging Planning, Participation, Communication, and Follow through, more and more customers are easily migrating from legacy platforms to JBoss EAP.

The Planning pillar analyzes an organization’s proprietary applications and processes. This stage elicits an understanding of the application environment, as Red Hat’s JBoss Windup tooling quickly scans applications to find and estimate migration effort for each application. Data from the Windup report allows us to group applications together and to plan for optimized parallel or repeatable migrations where appropriate. Those critical to the migration’s success from a business, development and operational standpoint are also consulted to best understand the skill sets, procedures, and timelines needed to support development, architecture, deployment, maintenance and monitoring tasks.

Participation is also critical to organizational success. Buy-in and support from management, business, development, testing, and operations creates a solid foundation for your new platform. Red Hat Consulting ensures you have the knowledge to be successful, offering background, mentoring and training, while also offering embedded support throughout the migration process.

As multiple teams rely on one another, Communication between business owners throughout the process is essential to a successful migration. Proper alignment through weekly meetings ensures the downstream team is ready to receive deliverables and move the migration process forward. Red Hat Consulting suggests an early week standup meeting and a late-week status check for effective planning and execution, ensuring no application is stranded during migration.

The final pillar, Follow through, involves selecting someone within the business to organize migration sprints, track progress, encourage participation and communication, and intervene when necessary to ensure responsibilities are met. This also helps identify and adjust glaring pain points, inefficiencies, and areas needing improvement for the subsequent migration phase.

Throughout a large migration, priorities will change and new profile requirements may come downstream to modify original migration details. Follow through ensures these everyday realities don’t disrupt the end goal: moving to a lower cost, lightweight, open source environment.

To learn more about Red Hat JBoss EAP migrations, visit http://windup.jboss.org or contact Brad Davis at bdavis@redhat.com.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.