Application Modernization & Migration

The Challenge

Most organizations running Kubernetes still have significant workloads that never made the journey — legacy applications running on bare metal, aging VMs managed by hand, or monoliths that were built before containers existed. These workloads are often the most business-critical and the hardest to touch.

The gap creates real friction. Modern delivery practices, automated scaling, and self-service developer platforms are available to new services but not to the systems that actually run the business. Teams end up maintaining two operating models indefinitely, and the legacy side drains engineering capacity without getting better.

Modernization projects have a poor reputation for good reason: many are framed as big-bang rewrites that take years and deliver uncertain value. The actual problem is usually sequencing and scope, not the technology.

Our Approach

We treat modernization as a migration problem, not a rewrite problem. The goal is to move workloads to a modern runtime — with the operational benefits that come with it — while preserving what’s working and minimizing risk to the business.

We start with an assessment: what’s running, how it’s coupled, what the dependencies are, and what the realistic migration paths look like for each workload. Not everything should be containerized. Some workloads are good candidates for lift-and-shift to VM-based container platforms; others benefit from incremental decomposition; a few may be better left alone or replaced with managed services.

From there we sequence migrations by risk and value, starting with workloads where the modernization benefit is clear and the coupling is low. We build the target platform alongside the migration rather than upfront, so each wave of workloads lands on something proven.

Technology Options

• Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA / Konveyor) — analyzes existing application portfolios for containerization readiness, flags dependencies and compatibility issues, and generates migration estimates
• OpenShift Virtualization — runs VMs directly on OpenShift, enabling VM workloads to be managed alongside containers with a shared operational model before full containerization
• Podman / Buildah — container build tooling for teams moving off traditional VM-based builds
• Strangler fig pattern — incremental decomposition strategy for monoliths: route traffic progressively to new implementations while the legacy system is still running
• Helm / Kustomize — packaging migrated workloads for repeatable, environment-consistent deployment
• GitOps (Argo CD / OpenShift GitOps) — bringing migrated workloads under version-controlled, auditable deployment management from day one