Migration from Weblogic to vFabric Cloud App Platform

Editor's Notes

• #3: Most people do not migrate because they see it only as IT optimization. But, with proper business case, they can incorporate aspects that will deliver business benefits as well.
• #4: This is the story of how VMware successfully migrated its portals used in customer purchases and support to Springsource stack addressing the technical issues while responding to the needs of business.
• #5: Any enterprise that built a complex piece of machinery to support their applications must be feeling the same way. They invested a lot in making a complex setup work, but it cannot keep with the times. The trend is now how organizations are focusing on what brings value to them. It means, cloud and PAAS to address the technical needs, while IT focuses on delivering what is needed for the business.
• #6: Original applications - Weblogic portal (Beehive) with local enhancementsIssuesPerformance: was not scaling with increasing number users and amount of data.Difficulty of managing: Adding a feature took long time to add; cleanup; un-deploy and deploy resulting in longer downtime.Application instability : Frequent reboots were requiredDifficulty of analysis: No built in application monitoring; external monitoring did not provide internal details or proactive alerts. What was needed:A scalable, robust, and manageable platform that is built on modern tools and technologies.
• #7: There was a debate on functionality improvement. We resolved it by saying: We want to enable resilient architecture – even if the components went down the users should be able to conduct their business.Whatever we need to change from functionality perspective to achieve the above goal, we will do.Any cleanup that is easy and supports the IT goals (HA, maintainability etc), we will do.Other functionality changes will be entertained only on the need basis (In general, no changes).
• #8: The business case template includes:ROI realization: When, what will change and how much it will save.Assumptions: What the current assumptions about the cost of downtime etc.Eventually, it provides a framework for us to create a plan and a time table.
• #9: These are standard steps. The main interesting part is lot of enhancements we can bring to operations, once we moved to the platform.
• #10: One major Constraint / requirement was, all of the user bookmarked URLs should work after migration with out any change. For example: On Weblogic, Login page was www.vmware.com/mysupport/login.portalThe same URL should work on Spring TcServer as well.
• #12: We went with the standard reference platform of spring source. It was easy; it was proven; and it supported our needs.
• #15: Why we did these changes:Moving to standardization and modern technologies: RMI is tough to debug and support.Reducing the tight coupling: Even if some components (some of those are not in our hands – they have different downtimes and different availability schedules) are down, the application still works.Non-functional enhancements: Caching to use Gemfire. Deployment changes: Cleaning up earlier disparate standards as well as introducing new standardized tools.
• #16: We could have considered emulation library as well, but in the long run, it is more painful than it is worth. We are not thinking this code as legacy – it is a living code and as such deserves no such short term fixes.
• #17: Pattern – Usage of “Member-Variables” in ControllersvFabric: Convert to Session variables in Spring MVC.@SessionAttributes(“sessionAttributeName”)public class MySessionVarClass {... ... }void myRequestMappingMethod(@ModelAttribute(“sessionAttributeName”) MySessionVarClassmsvc) {}Pattern – Persisting Application Logging to DatabaseDue to the use of Multiple logging frameworks, a multiple implementation were usedStandardized on Log4J.Used enhanced version Log4JDBAppender.Pattern – JSON SupportWL – no OOB support for JSON Serialization and DeserializationJSPs were used for de-serializing to JSON.Define object model on the Controller layer, and de-serialize them to JSON leveraging Spring-Jackson JSON Libraries.public @ResponseBodyOutputClasssaveSomething(@RequestBodySomeInputClass input) { //Little bit of logic to call Service Layer .. .. .. //Some more logic to convert service response to UI Object return output;}Pattern – Controller AnnotationsBeehive Pageflow Annotations converted to Spring MVC RequestMappingsNetuix tag libraries converted to MVC and JSTL Tag libraries.Pattern – AuthorizationWL – Container Authorization was leveragedSpring Security with Configuration based Access control and Role-User MappingPattern – Exception and Error HandlingWL – no common mechanism for error handlingClassify exceptions into Business and System Exceptions and populate appropriate codes. Use Spring MVC Exception Resolver to display appropriate error messages / pages
• #19: Maven 1 lacked support for JSP tagsLeverage Project Lifecycles – QA is interested in running automated integration tests only!Transitive dependencies – Large number of Open Source Libraries were used – difficult to manage with Maven1So, we migrated to maven2
• #24: The VMware Cloud Application Platform combines the Spring Framework for building new applications together with a complete set of Application Platform Services required to run and manage these applications.[CLICK] Spring Framework: Spring is a comprehensive family of developer frameworks and tools that enable developers build innovative new applications in a familiar and productive way while enabling the choice of where to run those applications, whether inside the datacenter or on private, hybrid, or public clouds. Spring enables developers to create applications that: Provide a rich, modern user experience across a range of platforms, browsers and personal devices Integrate applications using proven Enterprise Application Integration patterns, including batch processing Access data in a wide range of structured and unstructured formats Leverage popular social media services and cloud service API’s[CLICK] VMware vFabric: VMware vFabric is a comprehensive family of application services uniquely optimized for cloud computing including lightweight application server, global data management, cloud-ready messaging, dynamic load balancing and application performance management. [CLICK] The products behind these services include: Lightweight Application Server: tc Server, an enterprise version of Apache Tomcat, is optimized for Spring and VMware vSphere and can be instantaneously provisioned to meet the scalability needs of modern applications Data Management Services: GemFire speeds application performance and eliminates database bottlenecks by providing real-time access to globally distributed data Cloud-ready Messaging Service: RabbitMQ facilitates communications between applications inside and outside the datacenter Dynamic Load Balancer: ERS, an enterprise version Apache web server, ensures optimal performance by distributing and balancing application load Application Performance Management: Hyperic enables proactive performance management through transparent visibility into modern applications deployed across physical, virtual, and cloud environments Policy-Driven Automation: Foundry is the tentative name for a new offering still under development that is focused on policy-based automation of application and platform configuration and provisioning tasks.