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Rapid App containerization and migration to Azure

Written by Ashu Bajaj | May 2, 2022 6:30:00 PM

In today’s digital economy, the agility to respond effectively to changing market and customer needs is essential. An obsolete technology and application landscape, coupled with high operating and maintenance costs, adds to the complexity. According to a market study, by the end of 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production.

While Kubernetes can provide you with those capabilities, it can be complex to implement it. Running Kubernetes operations can be complicated and tackling security can be challenging. This is where Azure brings “Azure Migrate: App Containerization tool”. This is the latest tool in Azure Migrates Portfolio that can help you containerize your ASP.Net and Java Application and quickly migrate it to containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)with minimal to no code changes.

The Azure migrate – App containerisation tool looks at the running state of your application to help you determine how to package that application into a container image. You can then use this app container to deploy your application to AKS.

As you look at migrating your application to AKS there are a few different ways you could do this. You could rewrite or refactor your application to adopt a more modern paradigm such as Microservices and then run your application as containers on AKS. However, rewriting or refactoring your application requires skilled developers, time and investment. It may not be possible to justify the investment for all the applications in your application landscape. In addition, rewriting or refactoring may not be the right strategy for all your applications. For several of your applications, it may be possible to repackage and deploy as containers, without any refactoring or rewriting and still get the benefits of latest infrastructure and tools offered by Microsoft Azure. Azure Migrate App Containerization tool will help you with exactly this use case.

Azure Migrate App Containerization tool


The Azure Migrate App Containerization tool gives you an easy way to containerize your application without fundamentally altering the application structure. You can then migrate that application to a container on Azure Kubernetes Service to realize some of the key benefits such as improved utilisation.

How it works

1. Launch App Containerisation tool and run it on any windows machine with network access to your app servers.

2. Discover your application -

The tool starts by connecting to the server where the application is running, inspects the application, understands and discovers its components and then presents that option to the user. The tool then identifies the correct image that you can use as base image for container, identify the components, separates out the application binary file, static files and the configuration.

3. Parameterize application configuration –

The tool detects the application configuration such as database connection strings. It gives an option to parameterize this such that you can make it a deployment time configuration. There may be additional customizations that you may need such as if application has a state, you can move it to a persistent volume.


4. Build the container image.

Now the tool is ready to build the container image for the application. The tool based on detected application configurations and other selections that you made generates a Docker file that you can use to build a Docker container image for this application. You have an option to edit and customize the Docker file before using it to build the Docker image.


5. Deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service

After successful build, the tool is ready to start generating the Kubernetes definitions and manifest YAML files that are needed to deploy this application to AKS. The tool will generate the YAML files that specify the various Kubernetes artifacts that are needed to deploy the application to AKS.

The artifacts generated by the tool such as the Docker file and the Kubernetes manifests are available for download and day two operations using CI/CD pipelines.

Coforge can help you by leveraging cloud-native technologies including containers, serverless computing, and microservices on Azure Cloud. Coforge enables organizations to accelerate innovation, by designing and building customer-centric digital products and services faster.

Coforge’s Cloud Migration Services help enterprises migrate complex and critical applications to the cloud. A proven framework and solution aligned with CAF (Microsoft’s cloud adoption framework) help our customers to innovate, cost optimize, increase agility & scalability and accelerate time to market with business-defined outcomes.

Our comprehensive approach of Cloud Migration to Azure includes a unique blend of Process, Tools and Technology Experts.

Coforge has 700+ Azure Certified Professionals Partnership Ecosystem Deep Industry Knowledge Global 24*7 Support

Coforge has helped various customers globally on their Cloud Journey, Infrastructure modernization & application migration from traditional data centers to Azure Cloud.