Container Platform Migration Playbook
A phased program to migrate workloads from VMs and Docker Compose onto a managed container platform: containerization readiness, platform setup, secure CI delivery, and wave migration with observability.
Container Platform Migration Playbook
Moving from VMs or developer-only Docker Compose onto a managed container platform standardizes how applications are built, shipped, and run. This program containerizes workloads, stands up the platform, builds a secure delivery pipeline, and migrates in waves.
Phase-by-Phase
Containerization Readiness. Assess each workload for container fit. Apply twelve-factor principles: externalize configuration and state so containers stay stateless and disposable. Build hardened, minimal images. Stateful workloads need the most thought; plan their storage explicitly.
Platform Setup. Provision the container platform, whether managed Kubernetes or a PaaS, configure an image registry, and establish platform networking and ingress. Apply Pod Security Standards from the start.
Pipeline and Deploy. Build a CI pipeline that produces signed, scanned images. Adopt progressive delivery with canary or blue-green so rollouts are safe, and secure the supply chain with SLSA-aligned provenance and signing.
Migrate and Operate. Migrate workloads in waves, validating each. Instrument observability with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, define SLOs, and decommission the source VMs to realize the consolidation savings.
Team and Roles
An architect owns the platform choice. DevOps builds the platform and pipeline. Backend engineers containerize their services. SRE owns observability and reliability. Security owns image hardening and supply-chain controls.
Risks and Mitigations
Stateful workloads are the hardest; plan persistent storage and backups deliberately. Image bloat slows everything; use minimal base images and multi-stage builds. Networking misconfiguration causes subtle failures; test ingress and service discovery early. A skills gap is mitigated with golden-path templates and pairing.
Success Criteria
Deployment frequency rises, all in-scope workloads are migrated, MTTR falls with consistent observability, and images pass security scanning.
Tooling
Docker builds images, Kubernetes runs the platform, Helm packages applications, GitHub Actions runs the pipeline, and Prometheus provides observability.