Bitnami’s Stacksmith Aims to Make Moving Legacy Apps to Cloud Effortless
Bitnami, which offers pre-packaged applications that can be deployed to various cloud vendors, has released its Stacksmith enterprise application migration solution in the wild.
It aims to help companies — especially those with little cloud experience — move their custom and applications to public or private clouds.
“Bitnami’s deep expertise in packaging and maintaining cloud applications for a click-to-deploy experience allows us to automate far beyond just repackaging an application. It lets us also apply the platform-specific logic, templating and components needed to deliver a repackaged application that is optimized and ready-to-deploy,” said CEO Daniel Lopez.
Stacksmith is based on the technology it uses internally to package and maintain the catalog of about 120 open source applications that it publishes to all the major cloud marketplaces.
It’s designed to automate packaging of legacy applications into cloud-ready images, migrate them to the cloud and continuously monitor them afterward for upgrades and patches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KtlPjknAWw
“It’s not magic, but it’s a whole lot of automation and knowledge that we already have from the application catalog business we’ve been in. The intent is to take this approach to simplicity,” said Tom McCafferty, vice president of marketing.
If you look at the world today, your options for putting your application in the cloud is a virtual lift and shift: You just take your virtual machine and put it in a container in the cloud, he said.
“You have to have the knowledge to go build an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template or a CloudFormation template, but you’ve got to do all the design around it to make it actually run. In our case, you don’t have to do that. We build those things for you, too. It’s what we do every day for hundreds of applications.
“Our take on this is to give the world something better than a lift-and-shift option and get them to the point where, if an application does need to be re-architected or rewritten, we give them a path to get there.”
Without requiring any code revision, Stacksmith templates bring in all the required components for the target platform as well as best practices. Afterward, it automates ongoing maintenance tasks including monitoring for updates and security vulnerability patches.
If it’s running in a container in a Kubernetes environment, Stacksmith also builds a Helm chart to go along with it, so it has instructions on the infrastructure and how to deploy it.
REST APIs are available for companies that want to add Stacksmith to their delivery pipeline.
Adnan Abdulhussein, software developer at Bitnami, recently spoke at a Docker London Meetup on the lessons he learned over three years of containerization at the company.
Chef is among the vendors offering software packaging tools. Its Habitat Builder allows developers to package applications, yet hold off on making decisions about export format or runtime until deployment time. It’s integrating more security with its InSpec, its compliance automation solution.
Meanwhile, the similarities of packaging software and packaging beer were among the topics at analyst firm RedMonk’s London Monki Gras event in January.
Chef is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
