The cloud market is maturing, and organizations worldwide are well into implementing their cloud strategies. In fact, a recent McKinsey survey estimates that, by 2022, 75% all workloads will be running in either public or private clouds. Additionally, according to VMWare, 72% of businesses are looking for a path forward for their existing applications, and it is important to consider an app modernization strategy as part of these migration efforts.
Whether it be a desire to containerize, utilize cloud-native services, increase agility, or realize cost savings, the overall goal should be to deliver business value faster in the rapidly changing cloud environment.
Modern Application
Application modernization has a focus on legacy or “incumbent” line of business applications, and approaches range anywhere between re-hosting from the datacenter to cloud, to full cloud native application rewrites. We prefer to take a pragmatic approach, which is to address issues with legacy applications that hinder organizations from realizing the benefits of modern software and cloud native approaches, while retaining as much of the intellectual property that has been built into incumbent applications over the years as possible. Additionally, we find ways of augmenting existing code bases to make use of modern paradigms.
Application Modernization Strategies
When approaching legacy software architecture, people often discuss breaking apart monolithic applications and microservices. However, the most important architectural decisions should be centered around how to best allow the application to function well in the cloud, with scalability, fault-tolerance, and observability all being important aspects. A popular approach is to consider the tenants of the 12-Factor App to help guide these decisions.
Architecture discussions go hand in hand with considering platforms. Containerization and serverless functions are popular approaches, but equally valid is traditional VM clustering or even self-hosting. Additionally, we start to think about utilizing cloud services to offload some application complexity, such as AWS S3 for document storage or AWS KMS for key management. This leads us to consider different cloud providers themselves for best fit for the organization and the applications overall, whether it be AWS, Azure, GCP (Google cloud platform), or hybrid-cloud solutions.
Another very important aspect of application modernization, especially in the cloud, is ensuring that applications have proper automation.
Strong continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines should be implemented or enhanced for legacy applications. Additionally, we apply CD/CI automation for deploying database migrations and performing infrastructure-as-code (IaaC) updates, and ensure paradigms like immutable infrastructure (i.e. pre-packaging machine images or utilizing containerization) are utilized.
Last, there is an important cultural aspect to modernization from an organizational to team level. Organizations must consider modernization a part of their overall cloud strategy and support their development teams in this area. Development teams must adapt to new paradigms to understand and best utilize the cloud – adopting strong DevOps practices and reorganizing teams along business objectives instead of technology objectives is key.
By implementing a solid modernization strategy, businesses can realize the benefits the cloud provides, deliver value to their customers more rapidly, and compete in a rapidly changing cloud environment. If you’re ready to implement a modernization strategy in your organization, contact us for guidance on how to get started. Learn more about application modernization here.
– James Connell, Sr Cloud Consultant
