The New Stack Article for Kasten by Jason Bloomberg
In a previous article for The New Stack, I discussed the challenges and benefits of cloud native application portability.
Portable applications are good for hot backups, multicloud load balancing, deploying applications to new environments and switching from one cloud to another for business reasons.
However, such portability is difficult, because Kubernetes applications consist of ephemeral microservices, configurations and data. Kubernetes also handles state information in an abstracted way, since microservices are generally stateless.
It is therefore important to understand the value of Kubernetes application mobility. At first glance, application mobility appears to be synonymous with application portability, especially in the Kubernetes context.
If we look more closely, however, there is an important distinction, a distinction that clarifies how organizations can extract the most value out of this important feature.
Application migration, portability and mobility are similar but distinct concepts. Here are the differences.
- Application migration means moving either source code or application binaries from one environment to another, for example, from a virtual machine instance to one or more containers.
- Cloud native application portability centers on moving microservices-based workloads running on different instances of Kubernetes.
- Cloud native application mobility, the focus of this article, means ensuring that the consuming applications that interact with microservices work seamlessly regardless of the locations of the underlying software, even as workloads move from one environment to another.
Application portability supports application mobility but is neither necessary nor sufficient for it.
There are many benefits of application mobility, including cloud-service provider choice, revenue analyses and risk profile management. For Kubernetes in particular, application mobility is a valuable data management tool for near real-time analyses and performance evaluation.
As customer use drives the demands for an application, application owners can optimize the mix of cloud environments for each application and risk management system.
The impact of application mobility is its strategic value to short- and long-term planning and operational efforts necessary to protect a Kubernetes application portfolio across its life cycle.
