The Konveyor project dials in on replatforming and refactoring for 2023

In 2021, Red Hat and IBM Research together announced the creation of Konveyor, an open source project aimed at helping organizations modernize applications to run on Kubernetes. But as with all things in IT, this wasn’t a static need - as we’ve watched the community grow, we have realized that the tools and practices we create have to evolve to match the challenges in the real world. Moving forward, Konveyor’s mission is to create tools and practices aimed at modernizing and migrating applications to the hybrid cloud. The community’s emphasis will be centered on:  

• Replatforming, or making changes in order for an application to run in a container on a Kubernetes platform, but avoiding core architectural and code changes.
• Refactoring, which is rewriting and re-architecting an application to be cloud-native, such as moving a traditional application to a serverless architecture

To help achieve this extended mission, Konveyor’s technologies will also evolve, leading to: 

• The tool previously known as Tackle will become Konveyor and the capabilities of Move2Kube will be integrated into this new version of Konveyor. Crane and Forklift will be moved into separate GitHub repositories and projects. 
  • Konveyor will  focus on being the toolkit for replatforming and refactoring applications. 

The Konveyor operator, which will reflect this new emphasis, will be available both on OperatorHub.io for upstream Kubernetes distributions and the OperatorHub flavor available in OpenShift in late April.

This streamlined focus comes from two years of engagement and feedback from the Konveyor community, in addition to insight from a Red Hat sponsored survey of 600 IT decision makers, backend developers and software architects. This unified experience is intended to help users make the best informed business decisions surrounding application modernization. 

New contributor model

Along with these technical changes, we’re also making it even easier to contribute to the Konveyor community. This includes restructuring into a special interest group (SIG) model with four key focuses that include: 

• SIG Core, the group responsible for the core features of the Konveyor platform, encompassing modernization, report generation, integration of program management tools, hub design and more.
• SIG User Interface (UI) which helps guide the user experience across the platform and will work towards creating a pattern for add-ons can be dynamically included in the project hub.
• SIG Analyzers work to establish patterns for the community to contribute static code analyzers for different technologies. 
• SIG Integration, formerly known as SIG add-ons, will help explore, develop and support extensions to Konveyor that are not part of the core hub.

Additionally, the Konveyor project is in the early stages of developing the Konveyor ecosystem, which will consist of tools that warrant integration into Konveyor. This ecosystem will be intended to incubate tools that help solve for specific steps of the modernization process. 

Migration Toolkit for Applications

Based on this refocused version of the Konveyor project, Red Hat recently launched Migration Toolkit for Applications 6.0. This toolkit allows Red Hat OpenShift customers to benefit from faster, safer legacy application portfolio modernization. From exploring modernization strategies to enabling migration teams to execute and help reshape initial plans, the toolkit helps assist adoption leads and developers throughout each project phase in finding the best and most secure path forward. The tool can be used for portfolio or individual applications. When Red Hat OpenShift customers use Migration Toolkit for Applications 6.0.1 or newer versions, they can deploy the tool on any of the self-managed or managed versions of Red Hat OpenShift. 

If you want to keep up with Konveyor updates, please  join the konveyor.io mailing list and stop by the Red Hat KubeCon booth #24 to chat about all things application modernization.  In addition, check out the newly updated Migrating to Kubernetes learning path on KubebyExample.com, for free self-paced training authored by Konveyor subject matter experts.