Automate Application Migration with GKE Autopilot and Migrate for GKE

Many builders right this moment are selecting to develop and deploy new greenfield purposes on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). And it’s straightforward to know why—GKE gives an amazing mixture of scalability, safety, and ease of use. 

Nonetheless, what may shock lots of people is thatGKE can be typically chosen to run current brownfield workloads. As an illustration, purposes that had been beforehand deployed on digital machines. 

Corporations select emigrate their workloads from VMs to containers for any variety of causes:

• Permit for higher agility
• Cut back licensing prices in addition to operational prices
• Transfer off of finish of life working programs
• And plenty of extra

On this weblog we wish to speak about what is perhaps absolutely the best technique to take workloads working on digital machines and migrate them to Kubernetes. 

By leveraging the most recent model of Migrate for GKE, clients can transfer an software from any certainly one of a number of completely different VM platforms to GKE Autopilot. On this situation clients profit from each an automatic migration course of and a managed Kubernetes cluster. The mixture of those two applied sciences drastically cut back guide processes related to modernizing and internet hosting your legacy purposes. 

What’s GKE Autopilot

GKE Autopilot is a mode of operation for GKE clusters that drastically reduces the quantity of administration overhead related to working a Kubernetes cluster. 

Making a GKE Autopilot cluster requires just some clicks. The ensuing cluster is pre-configured with an optimized configuration that’s prepared for manufacturing workloads. This streamlined configuration follows GKE finest practices and proposals for cluster and workload setup and safety

As soon as the cluster is deployed, a lot of the continued administration is offloaded to Google Cloud. As an illustration, you not have to fret about scaling your employee nodes to deal with elevated demand. GKE Autopilot will robotically scale as wanted, however you solely pay for the precise assets, reminiscence and CPU, you eat. In distinction, beneath a regular mode GKE Cluster you pay for the nodes you’ve provisioned, no matter precise utilization. 

To study extra about GKE Autopilot take a look at the documentation or watch this video.

What’s Migrate for Anthos and GKE

Migrate for Anthos and GKE is a free instrument from Google Cloud that automates the migration of workloads from digital machines to Kubernetes. The supply VMs may be working on-prem on VMWare, or on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. 

As a way to be certain that you’re focusing on the appropriate workloads, Migrate for GKE features a match evaluation instrument that may look at a given VM and produce a report on whether or not or not the appliance is an effective candidate for migration. You may learn extra about planning finest practices in our documentation. 

Migrate for GKE will robotically look at your VMs and extract the core parts essential to run the appliance. After analyzing the VM, Migrate will produce a Dockerfile, Docker picture, and a Kubernetes deployment YAML so you possibly can seamlessly deploy your software. 

For extra data on the core capabilities of Migrate for Anthos and GKE take a look at this overview video.

Utilizing GKE Autopilot and Migrate for GKE collectively

With the discharge of Migrate for Anthos and GKE 1.eight a brand new characteristic was launched through public preview to supply containers that don’t require elevated privileges, permitting these containers to be deployed on GKE Autopilot clusters. And, better of all, it solely requires a single line within the migration YAML file to allow this new characteristic. 

When you’ve created your migration plan, all it is advisable do is ready  v2kServiceManager to true beneath the spec part.

For instance:

By setting the v2kServiceManager variable, your ensuing container may be deployed with out additional modification to GKE Autopilot. Not solely that, however that very same container could possibly be deployed to Cloud Run as effectively. And, in fact, it will additionally work on commonplace mode GKE clusters. 

In case you’d prefer to see a demo of Migrate for Anthos and GKE working with GKE Autopilot, take a look at the next video.