Improved tooling and best practices to help you migrate to OpenShift 4

OpenShift 4 was recently named a leading multicloud container platform by Forrester. It’s no wonder. With automated full-stack installation, seamless Kuberenetes deployments across clouds, automatic resource scaling, one-click updates, and enhanced developer tools and services, OpenShift 4 is designed for Hybrid Cloud.

Now, with the Migration Toolkit for Containers (MTC), Red Hat is making it easier and more intuitive than ever to migrate applications from OpenShift 3 to OpenShift 4. Formerly known as Cluster Application Migration (CAM), we are pleased to announce that the tooling has been renamed to Migration Toolkit for Container (MTC) to align with Red Hat’s ever increasing portfolio of tools to help customers migrate and modernize. Migration Toolkit for Containers joins Migration Toolkit for Virtualization and Migration Toolkit for Applications as part of the broader Migration Toolkit family, providing a broad assortment of full-featured tools that allows customers to migrate proprietary environments to Red Hat open source alternatives. 

In addition to all the new features and capabilities available in the MTC 1.3 release, we are also introducing a best practices guide based on lessons learned from large migrations. This guide is available here: https://red.ht/OCPBestPractices.

Here are some examples of steps that should be taken to help you be successful with a  migration.

Cluster Health Check

This may sound obvious, but migrations at scale should be performed on healthy clusters.   Before starting any large migration, you should validate that your source and destination clusters do not have any performance or stability issues. The new best practices guide provides information on the way in which you can check the health of your clusters prior to performing a migration.

Installing, Testing, and Understanding MTC

Getting started on MTC is fairly straightforward. That said, understanding exactly what is going on during a migration and doing some preliminary testing will go a long way when performing migrations at scale. We recommend starting simple with some "hello world" or simple developer applications to learn how the tool works. Make sure to test the stability and performance of simple migrations before starting the migration of more complex applications. If any migration fails, make sure to delete the namespace on the destination cluster before testing again.

Not All Namespaces Are Created Equal

As teams have developed and tested new ideas in your existing OpenShift clusters it is possible that some namespaces have gotten messy. Large amounts of resources could exist, and it might be preferable to do some cleaning up before migrating them to a new platform. MTC 1.3 introduces a new way to review your namespace resources before migrating them, helping you with a detailed view of exactly what will be migrated. In our best practices guide, you will also find information about how to do pruning, helping you remove unneeded builds, deployments, or images in those namespaces before migrating them. Sometimes, it might also be desirable to skip the processing of some specific resource types completely, which can also be done by changing some configuration variables in the migration controller within MTC.  

Troubleshooting Skills Are Important

MTC 1.3 provides new centralized debugging information to help you get to the root of any problem as quickly as possible. Our best practices guide also provides a flowchart helping you follow the right troubleshooting steps and understand better what is happening during the migration process. If none of these steps is sufficient, Red Hat support is available to help you out. A simple "must-gather" command is available to capture all the information needed from our experts to assist you. 

Red Hat Services and CEE Are Here to Help

Red Hat Consulting can help you plan and execute your migration from Red Hat OpenShift 3 to 4. We provide a coordinated strategy to help you adopt Red Hat OpenShift 4 and translate your processes into business value. Our consultants partner with you to validate your applications, automate your delivery, and take your apps to production, while sharing best practices and creating an effective migration strategy. Request a discovery session to get started. 

There are a wide variety of support services available to help you as you plan and execute your OpenShift migration allowing you to submit a ticket when you run into problems as well as to access Technical Account Management (TAM) services to maximize what OpenShift can do to help you achieve your business goals. The Red Hat Technical Account Management (TAM) service provides highly technical product specialists who proactively partner with your organization. TAMs specializing in OpenShift develop in-depth knowledge of your technical environment and business priorities. They work with you to address technical issues, manage your OpenShift deployments, and plan for the future.

We hope MTC 1.3 and our best practices guide will help you accomplish your migration to OpenShift 4 faster so that you can realize all the benefits the platform provides!