Dana CazacuDiscover how Atmosphere integrates OpenStack and Kubernetes to modernize legacy systems, bridging traditional IT with scalable, cloud-native solutions.
Legacy applications have long played a critical role in enterprise IT, quietly keeping operations running. Even though these "ancient" systems often hold invaluable data, it’s becoming harder and harder to find people who truly understand how to maintain or update them. Their monolithic architectures lack flexibility, making them rigid and difficult to scale as business needs evolve. High maintenance costs and integration challenges only add to the struggle of adapting these systems to modern workflows. As businesses push for greater efficiency, scalability, and agility, the need to modernize these outdated applications becomes impossible to ignore.
OpenStack and Kubernetes offer a powerful combination for modernizing legacy applications by bridging traditional IT and cloud-native technologies. OpenStack provides a flexible, open-source platform for managing virtual machines, storage, and networking, ensuring legacy systems can continue to operate while modern workloads are introduced. Kubernetes, on the other hand, enables containerized applications and microservices, allowing businesses to scale, automate, and innovate faster. Together, they create a unified environment where legacy applications can coexist with modern solutions, offering a clear path to scalability, efficiency, and future-proof infrastructure. With Atmosphere, this integration becomes seamless, providing a fully optimized platform that simplifies deployment, management, and scaling for both legacy and modern workloads.
§ How OpenStack Supports Legacy Applications
OpenStack supports legacy applications by providing a reliable and flexible platform for traditional workloads. It manages virtual machines (VMs) for both Windows and Linux systems, ensuring critical applications run smoothly. With powerful compute, storage, and Neutron’s advanced networking capabilities, OpenStack allows businesses to scale and adapt legacy systems to evolving needs. This makes it a stable solution for current operations while paving the way for modernization.
What makes OpenStack particularly valuable is its ability to serve as a bridge between traditional infrastructure and modern, cloud-native environments. By supporting both virtual machines (VMs) and containerized workloads on a single platform, OpenStack enables businesses to maintain their legacy systems while gradually transitioning to more modern architectures. This unified approach eliminates the need for disparate tools or platforms, simplifying operations and reducing complexity.
OpenStack’s open-source nature is another key advantage, offering unmatched flexibility to customize and optimize deployments for specific business needs. Organizations can tailor their infrastructure to align with unique workloads, compliance requirements, or operational goals, all while avoiding the constraints of vendor lock-in. This means businesses retain full control over their environment and can evolve it as necessary without being tied to proprietary solutions.
Additionally, OpenStack’s scalability ensures it can handle growing workloads and adapt to changing demands, whether running legacy applications, modern containerized services, or a hybrid mix of both. Its reliability, proven in some of the largest enterprise and cloud deployments globally, further solidifies its role as a robust foundation for IT modernization. By combining flexibility, scalability, and reliability, OpenStack empowers enterprises to not only maintain current operations but also build a forward-looking IT strategy that supports innovation and growth.
§ The Role of Kubernetes
As we all know, Kubernetes makes it easier for businesses to manage and scale containerized applications. It automates tasks like deploying, balancing, and recovering workloads, allowing applications to run more smoothly. Features like auto-scaling and rolling updates ensure flexibility and reliability, making Kubernetes a practical choice for moving from older systems to more modern, agile ones.
When paired with OpenStack, Kubernetes makes it easier to integrate modern, containerized workloads into environments that still rely on traditional VMs. This combination allows businesses to modernize incrementally, moving parts of their legacy applications into containers while maintaining the rest on their existing infrastructure. Kubernetes handles the orchestration of these containerized workloads, ensuring they are deployed, scaled, and managed efficiently, while OpenStack provides the foundational infrastructure for both VMs and containers. This unified approach reduces complexity and eliminates the need for multiple platforms, giving businesses the flexibility to transition at their own pace.
With Kubernetes, businesses can automate scaling, load balancing, and failover for containerized applications, while OpenStack ensures the underlying resources—compute, storage, and networking—are optimized for performance and reliability.
Together, these platforms create a seamless environment where modern and legacy workloads can coexist, enabling businesses to adopt cloud-native technologies without disrupting critical operations. By combining the strengths of OpenStack and Kubernetes, organizations can accelerate their journey toward modernization, ensuring scalability, flexibility, and long-term efficiency in their IT environments.
§ How Atmosphere Supports Modernization
Atmosphere combines the power of OpenStack and Kubernetes into a unified platform, helping businesses modernize by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments. Its specific capabilities enable enterprises to manage both traditional and modern workloads effectively, providing the tools needed for seamless integration and scalability.
Unified Platform for Hybrid Workloads
Atmosphere seamlessly integrates both virtual machines (VMs) and Kubernetes clusters into a single, unified platform, making it an ideal solution for hybrid environments that need to support both legacy and modern workloads. This flexibility ensures that businesses can maintain their existing operations while gradually adopting containerized, cloud-native approaches without the need for disruptive overhauls.
Atmosphere utilizes OpenStack’s Nova service to effectively manage virtual machines running on Windows or Linux, offering a dependable environment for critical legacy applications. This ensures businesses can maintain uninterrupted operations for essential workloads. For organizations dependent on older systems, this reliability is crucial, especially when a full transition to modern architectures is not yet feasible.
On the other hand, Atmosphere enables the deployment of containerized workloads through its integrated Kubernetes service, powered by OpenStack Magnum. This service allows businesses to adopt microservices architecture, which provides scalability, agility, and faster iteration cycles for modern applications. With Atmosphere, companies can deploy Kubernetes clusters alongside traditional VMs, creating an environment where both can coexist and complement each other.
The hybrid approach offered by Atmosphere allows businesses to transition legacy applications to containers at their own pace. For example, they can start by containerizing a single component of a monolithic application, such as a front-end service, while keeping the rest of the application running in its original VM environment. This gradual migration reduces risk, minimizes downtime, and ensures operational continuity during the modernization process.
Alongside supporting legacy applications, Atmosphere makes it easier for teams to adopt DevOps workflows. It brings together the tools and flexibility needed to deploy, test, and scale applications seamlessly, creating a smoother path from traditional systems to cloud-native environments. Atmosphere empowers developers with the same flexibility and ease of use found in public cloud platforms. This enables organizations to deliver the agility of public cloud environments while maintaining the control and customization of private infrastructure.
Kubernetes Integration
Atmosphere provides a fully integrated Kubernetes service with advanced features designed to streamline containerized workloads. It delivers CNCF-certified Kubernetes clusters, ensuring compatibility and reliability for enterprise-grade deployments. Native integration with Ceph storage through the CSI driver offers persistent storage for stateful applications, while auto-scaling and auto-healing features dynamically adjust workloads based on demand and resolve failures automatically. Cluster API support further simplifies Kubernetes lifecycle management, allowing businesses to efficiently scale and manage their clusters.
What sets Atmosphere apart is its ability to redefine the traditional cloud stack. By running OpenStack on Kubernetes while also provisioning Kubernetes clusters through OpenStack, Atmosphere creates a unique feedback loop that optimizes infrastructure management and workload orchestration. This approach not only ensures seamless integration between legacy and modern workloads but also enhances scalability and operational efficiency.
If you want to know more about this topic, check out this post Inside the Kubernetes Sandwich.
Advanced Networking
Networking is a critical component of modernization, and Atmosphere excels by offering robust capabilities to connect legacy and modern workloads seamlessly. The Neutron networking service supports virtual networks for both VMs and Kubernetes pods, enabling flexible configurations. SDN capabilities with OVN (Open Virtual Network) ensure seamless communication between legacy systems and containerized applications, bridging the gap between traditional and modern workloads. With features like floating IPs and virtual routers, Atmosphere simplifies network management, making it easy to move workloads across environments or datacenters without IP conflicts.
Scalable and Resilient Storage
Atmosphere leverages Ceph to provide scalable, high-performance storage for both VMs and Kubernetes workloads. Its block storage capabilities ensure reliable and fast storage for legacy applications and containerized services alike. Ceph replication ensures data is mirrored across multiple locations, improving disaster recovery and reducing the risk of data loss. Additionally, Ceph stretch clusters offer redundancy and optimized data distribution for enterprises with geographically distributed operations. This storage flexibility ensures that Atmosphere can meet the needs of both traditional systems and stateful containerized applications.
In addition to Ceph, Atmosphere supports third-party storage integrations, allowing businesses to tailor their storage solutions to meet unique requirements. If you’d like to learn more about Atmosphere’s approach to storage and third-party integrations, check out our post Deploying Atmosphere: A Guide to Storage Integration.
By offering integrated solutions for compute, storage, networking, and Kubernetes orchestration, Atmosphere provides enterprises with a clear modernization path. Its ability to run legacy and modern workloads side by side ensures businesses can move to cloud-native architectures at their own pace, without sacrificing reliability, scalability, or performance. The synergy between Atmosphere’s powerful platform and modern DevOps workflows enables developers to seamlessly modernize legacy applications. By leveraging automation, flexible resource provisioning, and advanced orchestration tools, teams can refactor or containerize legacy systems more efficiently while maintaining operational continuity. This makes Atmosphere a complete solution for organizations ready to modernize their IT environments.
If you’d like to bring Atmosphere into your organization with the help of our team of experts, our team can provide you with professional services for deployment, a subscription to provide full 24x7x365 support for Atmosphere (including OpenStack, & more), or a full hands-free remote operations, reach out to our sales team today!