Unleashing the Power of Kubernetes Application Mobility
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: A Primer
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.
Four Cloud Native Application Mobility Scenarios
For Kubernetes data management platform vendor Kasten by Veeam, application mobility serves four important use cases: cross-cloud portability, cluster upgrade testing, multicloud balancing and data management via spinning off a copy of the data.
Cross-cloud portability for Kubernetes applications is a clear example of application portability supporting application mobility, where application mobility provides seamless behavior for consuming applications during the porting of applications, either to other clouds or to upgraded clusters, respectively.
In Kubernetes, containerized applications are independent from the underlying infrastructure. This independence allows for transfer across a variety of platforms, including on-premises, public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
The key metric for Kubernetes application portability is the mean time to restore (MTTR) — how fast an organization can restore applications from one cluster to another.
Cluster upgrade testing is crucial for business owners who want to manage Kubernetes changes by predictably migrating applications to an upgraded cluster. The ability to catch and address upgrade-related issues as part of a normal operating process is imperative.
The key metric for cluster upgrade testing is the ability to catch important changes before they become a problem at scale so that the organization can address the problems, either by restoring individual components or the entire application.
Multicloud load balancing is an example of application mobility that doesn’t call upon portability, as an API gateway directs traffic and handles load balancing across individual cloud instances. In fact, API gateways enable load balancing across public and private clouds and enable organizations to manage applications according to the business policies in place.
The key metrics for multicloud load balancing center on managing cost, risk and performance in real time as the load balancing takes place.
Finally, data management leverages portability to support application mobility. An organization might use a copy of production data to measure application performance, data usage or other parameters.
Such activities depend on the seamless behavior across live and copied data, behavior that leverages application mobility to spin data to an offline copy for both data analysis as well as data protection once an application or service has begun production.
Key metrics for data management include measures of live application and service data performance, data usage and other characteristics of the current application data set.
The Intellyx Take
The distinction between Kubernetes application portability and mobility is subtle, but important.
Portability is, in essence, one layer of abstraction below mobility, as it focuses on the physical movement of application components or workloads.
Application mobility, in contrast, focuses on making the consumption of application resources location-independent, allowing for the free movement of those consumers as well as the underlying resources.
Given that Kubernetes is infrastructure software, such consumers are themselves applications that may or may not directly affect the user experience. Furthermore, the workloads running on that infrastructure are themselves abstractions of a collection of ephemeral and persistent elements.
Workloads may move, or they may run in many places at once, or they may run in one place and then another, depending on the particular use case. When consuming applications are none the wiser, the organization can say that they have achieved application mobility.
