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Organizations are looking to leverage the power of cloud computing to create new digital business models and drive operational efficiency. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the leading cloud computing platforms that help companies become more agile and cost-efficient to deliver on business objectives and priorities. As companies embrace cloud adoption for more reliable, cost-effective, and secure storage solutions, investing in AWS consultants has become a crucial part of the process.

AWS cloud services provide a tremendous opportunity for business development and growth, especially when combined with a reputable cloud consultant. AWS cloud computing allows organizations to safely and securely store vast amounts of data while ingesting and processing that data to make it actionable. It also enables IT teams to increase scalability and capability quickly and efficiently, so businesses can stay ahead of their competition.

A cloud consultant experienced in working with AWS cloud technology can ensure that cloud strategies align with organizational needs, providing tailored solutions for maximum innovation and profit potential. By utilizing cloud computing consulting services from AWS, businesses can leverage cutting-edge cloud solutions to drive competitive advantage.

Working with AWS consultants like 2nd Watch can help your organization harness the technology that AWS offers, modernizing your business operations and transforming your IT infrastructure to solve your business challenges and hit critical business goals.

What is AWS Consulting?

AWS consulting services offer businesses a range of solutions and expertise to facilitate your organization’s success with cloud migration and in-cloud processes. These services include advising on best practices, migrating existing applications, building new applications, and optimizing overall performance. AWS consultants are highly experienced professionals who have a deep understanding of the AWS platform and provide invaluable insights into how it can be used within an organization to support digital transformation.

The value of working with these experts is that they understand the complexities of managing AWS’s infrastructure, cloud-native solutions, database services, and developer tools. AWS consultants analyze an organization’s existing setup and recommend practices for improved efficiency, scalability, security, cost optimization, reliability, and other aspects of their cloud environment. For example, they can help to ensure that an organization’s environment is properly configured and securely managed, so data remains safe and accessible to users. They can also provide expert guidance on which additional resources may be needed for more robust performance.

The Benefits of Working With an AWS Consultant

The main goal of any AWS consultant is to help businesses make the most of their investments in AWS products and services. This includes helping them choose appropriate services (such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, or Amazon RDS,) providing advice on configuring their environment correctly, ensuring their applications run efficiently in the cloud, and optimizing costs by scaling up or down resources as needed. Moreover, AWS consultants can help set up automated processes, such as deploying new versions of software or monitoring performance metrics. Most importantly, they can also offer advice on security best practices when working with sensitive information in the cloud.

By taking advantage of an experienced AWS consulting team, businesses can benefit from numerous advantages, including reduced costs, improved performance, scalability, and flexibility. With a tailored approach, organizations can positively impact their bottom line by leveraging the right combination of services and resources offered by AWS, such as compute power, storage capacity, database solutions, content delivery networks (CDNs), analytics tools, and machine learning capabilities, among others.

Working with an AWS consultant will improve performance by quickly spinning up new resources and scaling their existing infrastructure as needed without worrying about additional hardware or software investments. Additionally, AWS consulting teams will assist with migrations and optimization processes so that businesses can ensure their operations are running smoothly with minimal disruption or downtime.

Investing in an Experienced Team

When it comes to leveraging cloud computing platforms like AWS, organizations need to invest in an experienced team that understands both the technology as well as the business objectives of the organization. Good consultants should provide best practices while understanding the strategies that will work best for an organization’s specific needs. Organizations will increase their chances of success and ROI with the cloud when they invest in an experienced team.

Partnering with the right experts will maximize the opportunities and services offered by AWS.

Companies can learn how to utilize AWS database services better and develop tools that meet their IT and business objectives. This can help businesses optimize their IT infrastructure while reducing capital expenditures, which will maximize profit potential. Through AWS consulting, organizations have access to cloud-based solutions that allow them to run their applications faster, scale easily and cost-effectively, increase security, provide insights into customer behavior and create innovative products. Ultimately, beyond the technical aspects, AWS consulting can help organizations achieve peak performance both operationally and financially.

Conclusion

Harnessing the power of AWS provides businesses with many benefits, including cost savings, improved performance, scalability, and flexibility. However, these benefits can only be realized if you have an experienced team guiding your transformation efforts. Investing in a qualified AWS consulting team allows organizations to take full advantage of this technology while ensuring that their operations remain secure and compliant with industry standards. Having access to experts who understand both your business objectives as well as how best to leverage this technology will give you peace of mind knowing that your transformation project is being handled correctly from start to finish.

2nd Watch employs a cloud transformation framework and methodology for every engagement guaranteeing quality, consistency, and completeness. We start by listening to identify and strike a balance between innovation, self-sufficiency, risk, and cost. We then work with you to determine where you are in your cloud journey and assemble a tailored bundle of services to meet your IT business objectives.

We have been recognized by AWS as a Premier Partner since 2012 and as an audited and approved Managed Service Provider for our outstanding customer experiences, the depth and breadth of our products and services, and our ability to scale to meet customer demand. Our engineers and architects are 100% certified on AWS, holding over 200 AWS certifications.

If the global pandemic taught us anything, it’s that digital transformation is a must-have for businesses to keep up with customer demands and remain competitive. To do this, organizations are moving their workloads to and modernizing their applications for the cloud faster than ever.

In fact, according to a recent survey, 91% of respondents agree or strongly agree that application modernization plays a critical role in their organization’s adaptability to rapidly changing business conditions. But there are so many cloud service providers to choose from! How do you know which one is best for your application modernization objectives? Keep reading to find out!

What is a Cloud Services Provider (CSP)?

A cloud services provider is a cloud computing company that provides public clouds, managed private clouds, or on-demand cloud infrastructures, platforms, and services. Many CSPs are available worldwide, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. However, three industry giants are noteworthy because of their services and global footprint: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

What is Application Modernization?

Application modernization is the process of revamping an application to take advantage of breakthrough technical innovations to improve the overall efficiency of the application remarkably. This efficiency typically involves high availability, increased fault tolerance, high scalability, improved security, eliminating a single point of failure, disaster recovery, contemporary and simplified tools, new coding language, and reduced resource requirements, among other benefits. Many companies running legacy applications are now looking at how they can best modernize their monolith applications.

Application Rationalization: The First Step to Modernization

The best way to start any application modernization journey is with application rationalization. In this process, you identify company-wide business applications and strategically determine which ones you should keep, replace, retire, or consolidate. Once you identify those applications, you can list each one’s ease or difficulty level, total cost of ownership (TCO), and business value, enabling you to decide and prioritize which action to take. (Hint: Start with high value and minimal effort apps!) Doing this will also help you eliminate redundancies, lower costs, and maximize efficiency.

The high-value apps that are difficult to move to the cloud will likely cause the most grief in your decision-making process. But, like Rome, your modernization strategy doesn’t need to be built in a day.

You can develop an approach to application modernization over time and still reduce costs and risks while moving your portfolio forward.

It is crucial to evaluate your current application stack and determine the most suitable application modernization strategy to migrate to the cloud when it comes to application modernization in the cloud. Many on-premises applications are legacy monoliths that may benefit more from refactoring than a rehosting (“lift and shift”) approach. (Check out Rehost, Refactor, Replatform – What, When, & Why? | AppMod Essentials)

Refactoring may require overhauling your application code, which takes some high-level effort but offers the most benefits. However, not all applications are ideal candidates for refactoring. Rearchitecting will become necessary for some obsolete applications that are not compatible with the cloud due to architectural designs made while building the app. In this scenario, the value proposition considers rearchitecting, dividing the application into several functional components that can be individually adapted and further developed. These small, independent pieces—or “microservices”—can then be migrated to the cloud quickly and efficiently.

Determining the Best Cloud Services Provider for Your Application Modernization

Each application modernization journey is unique, as is the process of choosing the best cloud service provider that meets your demands. What works for one business’ application may not be the best for yours, even if they are in the same industry. And just because a competitor has chosen one CSP over another does not mean you should.

When evaluating the CSP that is best for you, consider the following:

Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Determine if the CSP’s service level agreements suit your production workloads, whether the cloud service is generally available yet, and they retain satisfactory levels of support knowledge. Managing workloads in the cloud can sometimes be tedious. The managed services department may not have the required expertise to efficiently manage and monitor the cloud environment. It is critical to your business to do your due diligence to ensure your preferred CSP can administer their managed offerings with as close to zero downtime as possible.

Vendor Lock-in: It is important to have alternatives to any single CSP and that you retain the flexibility to substitute for a better value proposition.

Enterprise Adoption: Consider the likelihood of scalability of your use of the CSP across your organization.
Economic Impact: Consider the positive business or financial impacts that result from the service usage at the individual, department, and company-wide levels.
Automation and Deployment: Verify the CSP’s integration capabilities with your organization’s preferred automation tooling and availability of automated and local testing frameworks.

CSP Application Modernization Design Considerations

When modernizing existing applications to take the best advantage of the cloud, cloud technologies like serverless and containers are good options to consider. Serverless computing and containers are cloud-native tools that automate code deployment into isolated environments. Developers can build highly scalable applications with fewer resources within a short time. They both also reduce overhead for cloud-hosted web applications but differ in many ways. Private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud approaches to application modernization are worth considering too.

Serverless Computing and Containers

Serverless computing is an exaction model where the CSP executes a piece of code by dynamically allocating the resources and can only charge for the services used to run the code. Code is typically run in stateless containers. Various events such as HTTP requests, monitoring alerts, database events, queuing services, file uploads, scheduled events (cron jobs), and more can trigger them.

The cloud service provider then receives the code in a function to execute, which is why serverless computing is sometimes referred to as a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform. Add that to your list of as-a-Service acronyms: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS!

The FaaS offerings of the three major CSPs are:

Containers provide a discrete environment set up within an operating system. They can run one or more applications, typically assigned only those resources necessary for the application to function correctly. Because containers are smaller and faster than virtual machines, they allow applications to run quickly and reliably among various computing environments. Container images become containers at runtime and include everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings.

Private, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud

The public cloud is a vital part of any modernization strategy. However, some organizations may not be ready to go directly to the public cloud from the datacenter. Cloud architects should consider private, hybrid, and multi-cloud strategies in those cases. These models can help resolve any architectural, security, or latency concerns. They will also reduce the complexity associated with the policies for specific workloads based on their unique characteristics.

Conclusion

Migration to the cloud is ideal for investing in application modernization as it can lower your overall operational costs and increase your application’s resiliency. But not all use cases—nor cloud service providers—are the same. You need to do your homework before choosing the best-suited one for your business.

2nd Watch offers a comprehensive consulting methodology and proven tools to accelerate your cloud-native and app modernization objectives. Our modernization process begins with a complete assessment of your existing application portfolio to identify which you should keep, replace, retire, or consolidate. We then develop and implement a modernization strategy that best meets your business needs.

From application rationalization to application modernization and beyond, 2nd Watch is your go-to trusted advisor throughout your entire modernization journey.

By Alex Ifebigh, 2nd Watch Sr. Cloud Consultant