The ability to deploy, run, and manage containers and virtual machines (VMs) side-by-side can enable developers to quickly add cloud-native capabilities to traditional virtualized apps. Adding containerized microservices and cloud-native components to existing web apps facilitates gradual modernization of legacy apps, instead of forcing organizations into risky mass-migration projects. This unified approach toward managing hybrid applications via a single platform and set of tools is the foundation for consistent, efficient, secure, and compliant deployment and management, as it avoids silos between traditional and cloud-native applications.¹

Figure 1. Organizations want to be able to retain and modernize their application workloads without the pressure and risk of shifting to a microservices architecture immediately.

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

Research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group shows that 43% of organizations prefer to retain existing applications on-premises but at the same time shift them to more modern architectures. This demonstrates how important it is to offer organizations a gradual, controlled, and hybrid approach to application modernization.

Red Hat’s OpenShift 4.16 adds several strong enterprise-grade features that aim to enable OpenShift Virtualization to allow organizations to modernize at their own pace by running legacy apps and modern microservices apps side-by-side on the same platform.

^1. Source: All references and charts in this Brief, unless otherwise noted, are from Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results, Multi-cloud Application Deployment and Decision Making, May 2023.