Mastering Application Migration to VKS: Patterns and Best Practices

Strategy 1: The “Lift and Shift” (Re-platforming) How it works The caveats Strategy 2: The “Pipeline Retargeting” (Re-deploy) How it works The “VCF native” evolution The Stateful Dilemma: Handling Persistent Data The solution Handling “The Big Version Jump” (Upgrades) Conclusion Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Model Gallery: How to Use JupyterLab Notebooks to Simplify Model Deployment and Management Mastering Application Migration to VKS: Patterns and Best Practices Automic Automation: Application-Aware Automation for the Private Cloud Migrating applications to a modern platform like VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) is rarely a “one-size-fits-all” operation. Whether you are moving from a generic Kubernetes provider (like OpenShift, EKS, or GKE), migrating from virtual machines, or repatriating cloud services, the strategy you choose depends heavily on your current automation maturity and workload requirements. In this post, we discuss the primary migration patterns: re-platforming (“lift and shift”) versus re-deploying (pipeline-driven). The following guide can help you choose the right path for your organization. Best for: Organizations with little to no automation or deployment pipelines If your team is hand-deploying applications or lacks mature GitOps practices, the most viable path is often a “backup and restore” approach using tools like Velero. Backup source state: Velero queries the source Kubernetes API to grab all objects (deployments, secrets, config maps, services) and bundles them into an S3-compatible storage bucket. Restore to VKS: You install Velero on the destination VKS cluster and restore from that backup. Since VKS is CNCF-conformant, it replays the API details into the new cluster. Be selective: You cannot simply back up everything. You must avoid system namespaces (like kube-system) and target only specific application workloads using labels and selectors. Manual cleanup: This is a 1:1 state copy. If the destination environment requires different configurations (e.