Assess and refactor with Tackle
Overview of Tackle
Your containerization and journey to Kubernetes might be easier if you have a green field. But what if it's the complete opposite? What if you have hundreds of legacy applications alongside their dependencies for dozens of business services? The open-source Tackle tool, as part of the Konveyor project, helps you assess your application portfolio to get recommendations in your journey to Kubernetes. This blog talks about the tools that make up Tackle and how they help streamline the modernization and migration of your application portfolio to Kubernetes.
How Tackle fits into the overall Konveyor landscape
Tackle is one of the projects under the larger Konveyor umbrella community. Let's use the following diagram to discuss how Tackle fits in and what problems it addresses.
At first, we assess our application portfolio with Tackle Pathfinder - a tool that is used to come up with the migration strategy to follow with each application or application type. For the refactor strategy, we can also use Tackle to detect what needs to be changed for all of the applications assessed by Tackle Pathfinder to run on the target environment and provide guidelines as well as some degree of automation for how to perform these changes.
Once your applications are assessed by Tackle, they can be rehosted using Crane or Forklift, replatformed using Move2Kube, and/or refactored using other tools that are part of the Tackle project.
How Tackle components come together to help you assess applications to migrate to Kubernetes
Tackle is comprised of three key pillars:
- Application Inventory
- Pathfinder
- Controls
The Controls component is a bit different from the first two as it is used to store master data for the Application Inventory and Pathfinder. This blog will highlight Pathfinder and Application Inventory since Tackle users will not interact with the Controls component directly.
Tackle Application Inventory allows users to maintain their portfolio of applications, link them to the business services that they support, define their interdependencies, and use an extensible tagging model to add metadata to describe and categorize them in multiple dimensions. The Application Inventory is the vehicle by which an application can be selected for assessment by Pathfinder.
Tackle Pathfinder is a questionnaire-based tool that assesses the suitability of applications for modernization in order to be deployed in Containers on an enterprise Kubernetes platform. Through interaction with the questionnaire, and a review process, the system is enriched with application knowledge which is exposed via a collection of reports. The reports provide information about applications’ suitability for Kubernetes, highlight associated risks, and generate an adoption plan informed by the applications’ prioritization, business criticality, and dependencies.
Both Application Inventory and Pathfinder tools are accessible from a common Tackle UI.
In addition to the above two tools, there are Tackle DiVA, Tackle Test Generator, and Tackle Container Advisor which you can learn more about from the links below the Resources section.