Janus: A Tool to Modernize Legacy Applications to Containers

Abstract

Modernizing a legacy application to a set of containers is highly desirable as containers are agile, scalable, and can be easily tested and deployed on any cloud environment. In this paper, we propose Janus, a modernization tool that helps architects and developers to transform a legacy application into a set of containers. Janus realizes two capabilities: one, it automatically discovers configurations and dependencies needed to create docker artifacts, with prior rules and knowledge mined from similar legacy applications; two, it provides a dynamic web interface to interact with architect/developer to verify the discovered configurations and dependencies and guide users in acquiring missing information. We provide a demonstration of Janus on a legacy application.