We are very happy to announce the availability of guidance to run IBM WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Developed alongside IBM, the guidance utilizes the Open Liberty Operator and provides step-by-step instructions for running WebSphere Liberty or Open Liberty on an AKS cluster. The guidance is intended to make it easy to get started with production ready deployments utilizing best practices from both IBM and Microsoft. Evaluate the guidance for full production usage and reach out to collaborate on migration cases.
Solution Details and Roadmap
Part of the WebSphere family of products, WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty are IBM’s next generation Java platforms and are important to cloud modernization of mission critical enterprise Java workloads. Open Liberty is the production-ready, free, open-source base for WebSphere Liberty. Sharing the same core implementation, both offerings are fast, lightweight, modular, and container-friendly cloud native runtimes with robust support for industry standards such as Java EE, Jakarta EE, and MicroProfile. We previously released guidance for running WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO). This release expands the guidance for customers interested in running WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on Azure managed container platforms.
The combination of AKS with WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty offers a powerful and flexible platform for enterprise Java customers. The Open Liberty Operator allows you to reliably deploy and manage Java applications on both WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty. In addition to deployment and management on a Kubernetes cluster, the Operator also enables gathering traces and dumps for diagnostics.
The guidance uses official WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty Docker images from IBM and demonstrates using Azure Container Registry (ACR). The guidance enables a wide range of production-ready deployment architectures and provides complete flexibility to customize deployments. After deploying your applications, you can take advantage of a range of Azure resources for additional functionality.
In the next few months, IBM and Microsoft will explore providing jointly developed and supported Marketplace offerings targeting WebSphere Traditional on Azure Virtual Machines, WebSphere Liberty/Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), and WebSphere Liberty/Open Liberty on AKS. To learn more about Open Liberty on Azure and the IBM collaboration, watch this IBM Expert TV session presented by Reza Rahman, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and Graham Charters, STSM and Liberty Technical Offering Manager at IBM.
These solutions follow a Bring-Your-Own-License model. For WebSphere Liberty; you must have the appropriate licenses from IBM and are properly licensed to run offers in Azure. The solutions themselves are available free of charge, as is Open Liberty and the Open Liberty Operator (customers can purchase optional IBM support for Open Liberty). Customers are responsible for Azure resource usage.
Get started with WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty on AKS
Explore the guidance, provide feedback, and stay informed of the roadmap. You can also take advantage of hands-on help from the engineering team behind these efforts. The opportunity to collaborate on a migration scenario is completely free while solutions are under active initial development.