Modernize Java apps in days with GitHub Copilot

Key Takeaways

We live in a world where technology is moving faster than the speed of light. Okay, maybe not, but I think it's a great analogy. Creating an application is one thing. Keeping it up to date, it's a whole different kind of ordeal. As a developer, I don't know how many times you have said, "Isn't it just easier to redevelop or start over?" I know I have. Going through all the old code, trying to figure out what it does and modernize it. Impossible. But we are so excited to release the new GitHub Copilot app mod tool which is designed to make your life easier and use the power of AI to make modernization, migration, and deployment easier. Let's go ahead and dive in. So, we'll go ahead and open up the GitHub Copilot app modernization tool and we will run our assessment. When we click on run assessment, our co-pilot starts working hard at understanding our code and seeing everything that needs to be done in order to upgrade our application. In addition, it automatically installs any additional tools such as AppCat which assist with the assessment. All right, so we can see that the assessment has finished running. We get a nice little nifty UI which explains everything that the co-pilot discovered when going through our application. And there's two main categories of issues. We can see that there's some Java upgrade issues. In addition, there's some cloud readiness issues. So, let's go ahead and get started with upgrading our Java version. So, we'll go ahead and click on upgrade. And what this will do is it will trigger Copilot to generate an action plan that allows us to first review what Copilot wants to do, make any edits if necessary, and then go ahead and continue. So we'll wait for the action plan to be generated. Okay, so here's our upgrade plan. We can see that the goal is to upgrade to Java 21. It has steps laid out which copilot will follow and it lays down the framework that we will follow as we continue with the upgrade. So we'll go ahead and click on continue and the upgrade should now take place automatically. So using the power of AI and tools like open rewrite the Java upgrade tool is able to update frameworks and dependencies. It performs security checks and CVE checks. It generates reports such as what files were changed, updates dependencies, and fixes any other issues it discovered. And finally, it generates additional unit tests separately to make sure that the application is performing as it should. All right. So, we can see that the Java project finished upgrading. We get a nifty little report here which tells us about all the changes that were made and in addition the CVE validation checks, potential issues, behavior changes and any other information which can be important as we continue with the project. So now let's go ahead and refresh our assessment report and we should see that we no longer have any Java upgrade issues. Okay, so we can see that we have a new assessment report. The issue we had previously about upgrading our Java version to 21 is no longer there. For the other two Java upgrade issues, we would follow a similar process where we go ahead and just click on upgrade. Let's go ahead and move to some of the cloud readiness issues. We'll start by migrating our Postgregql. So let's go ahead and click that we want to migrate to public cloud. And similar to upgrading our Java version, we will click on migrate and copilot will generate first of all a summary or an action plan which we can then review. And after we approve it, Copilot does the magic and migrates our database. Okay. So here is the migration plan that copilot created. We can see that there is a progress tab which tells us about everything Cop-ilot will need to do. There are certain steps which copilot will go through such as CVE checks, fixing any build issues, tests, consistency checks, etc. If everything looks okay, we can tell Copilot that it is okay to continue and Copilot will once again take over. And it's super cool because it's almost like you have a full development team at your fingertips and you're able to watch as they do the work for you. Okay. So we can see that the migration completed. We get a nifty little report on everything that copilot took took action upon. We can review it. If any additional changes are needed, we can take the help of co-pilot. In addition, we can see the validation results that the project built successfully. There were no test issues. The CVE checks passed and the code consistency check pass. With everything looking good, you can go back to your assessment report and click on migrate for all the other features that you need to migrate over to Azure. I don't want you to sit around. So let's go ahead and jump to a fully migrated application that I have pre-prepared to now jump into into the most exciting part which is deploying our application to Azure. So we'll go ahead and use an MCP tool to call a code to cloud tool which streamlines the process of deploying to Azure. Copilot will scan the project and generate a deployment plan for us to review. So, Cop-ilot has generated an architecture diagram for us to take a look at. The goal of this architecture diagram is to confirm that C-Pilot's understanding of the application is in fact correct. If there are any issues, we can tell Copilot to take a look again and resolve them. In this case, everything looks great. So, we'll let Copilot continue with generating the full deployment plan. So here's our deployment plan for our asset manager project. We get the overall project information, the diagram from the previous step, the recommended Azure resources that C-Pilot will deploy, as well as dependencies, and finally at the bottom, we have the execution steps, which is the step-by-step guide that Copilot will follow when it works to deploy the project. So let's go ahead and tell Copilot to continue and it will now finally deploy our application to the cloud. While Copilot is working, it'll verify different prerequisites, validate the infrastructure code, and finally deploy using AZD. Let's go ahead and jump ahead to when the project has finished deploying all of its assets. If we open up Azure portal, we can see that we successfully deployed our project, including container apps, container registry, our databases, and so on. Wow. Wow. Wow. What an experience. Microsoft's new app modernization tool gives us the power of a full team of developers just a click away. No, it didn't quite take us just five minutes, but with the help of co-pilot in just a single afternoon, we have modernized, migrated, and deployed our application. I myself took a few coffee breaks in between as Copilot took over. I now pass the baton over to you to try out Microsoft's new Copilot app modernization tool for Java. The power of AI now lies in your hands.