What You Need to Know When Moving Applications From Bare-Metal to the Cloud

Laura Braverman is a Senior Software Engineer for IBM. She has twenty years of experience in the Enterprise Storage industry at IBM and Oracle. She has a breadth of experience ranging from system-level testing to full-stack development to leading software development teams. In her current role, she serves as Scrum Master and developer with the IBM Spectrum Scale Container Native Storage access team. 

She spoke at this year's All Day DevOps (ADDO), the world's largest DevOps conference. The 24-hour event was live-streamed on October 28, 2021, reaching nearly  20,000 DevOps professionals from around the world. They gathered for free, hands-on discussions and education from 180+ speakers, along with peer-to-peer insights and networking with professionals worldwide.

Laura’s talk entitled Baptism by fire - Enabling IBM Spectrum Scale in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, draws on the lessons learned from the adventure she and her team embarked on when moving an existing, successful project to be cloud native. Specifically, she focused on how she and her team took IBM Spectrum Scale - a clustered file system software used by many of the world's largest commercial companies - into Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Behind the scenes view

Braverman's talk will share other tips  and anecdotes taken from the lessons learned  of being deeply engaged within such an IT project. As an example, she shares:

"With older process methodologies, a very clear design document was given to the development team upfront and then they’d go ahead and start coding. Today, the initial design may not be as explicit or rigidly defined as it used to be, which makes it more difficult to size accurately or have a clear definition of what the whole picture entails. This is especially true when trying to move an application that already exists forward and you cannot anticipate what you will run into during the development cycle. Through trial and error, you'll figure out what works, and you can go from there. While the design may not be there 100 percent on day one, it does not  mean that it is not present. It's still there; you just need a bit more creativity and imagination to get to the end solution."

Her presentation effectively draws upon her reflections on the magnificent challenge she and her team were given and the various elements they needed to consider - some being more predictable than others. Things like:

• How do we move a well-defined and well-established product (IBM Spectrum Scale) from a bare-metal system to Kubernetes (Red Hat OpenShift)?
• What kind of challenges does the declarative nature of Kubernetes entail?
• What kind of impact does the new platform have on the functionality of the product?
• How do you define a build process for an established product?

Attendees and Takeaways

She tells us that, from a high-level view, the ideal attendee would be anyone who needs to bring bare-metal applications to a cloud native environment. Those more interested in the experiential tale of bringing such an undertaking to completion, rather than the actual tech involved, should also attend. The concepts of teams, processes, and how they fit together will be discussed, as will various difficulties that might impact the project to keep in mind and how to navigate them.

As Braverman says, "This talk will be valuable to others who are tasked with moving an established project into a new architecture. The lessons learned that we stumbled upon are not new or groundbreaking, but I think it can be insightful to hear what another team has gone through in their journey.”

Watch All Day DevOps (ADDO)

All Day DevOps (ADDO) is a global community of over 75,000 DevOps practitioners and thought leaders offering free learning and information exchanges. The 2021 event featured the best and brightest of the global industry, featuring six tracks, including CI/CD Continuous Everything, Cultural Transformation, DevSecOps, Government, Modern Infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering.

Missed ADDO live? Sign up to watch Laura Braverman discuss how to move bare metal applications to cloud native. View the ADDO speaker lineup to see what other engaging speakers joined us across a variety of industries.