Why to Go for Application Modernization?

Application Modernization is a hot topic these days for organizations of all sizes.

These days, Enterprises are pushed towards application modernization by business. Business demands greater and greater agility, scalability, responsiveness, and all of that with cost-efficiency and pay as you go (OPEX) manner. The legacy traditional CAPEX models are gone where enterprises must spend huge amounts every few years, considering the peak demand.

Application modernization refers to restructuring of existing applications (by de-coupling its components) and make them “cloud-native” by leveraging modern cloud technologies, with an aim to deliver following values:

1. Reduced management and operations overhead
2. Increased Agility (provisioning, de-provisioning etc.)
3. Increased Scalability & Flexibility
4. Reduced Cost (of ownership)

If you note, above features sound so similar to the features offered by “cloud computing”. That’s what cloud promises to offer, in full, when your applications are modernized. That is where enterprises realize and get the most out of cloud. However, to reach there, it require a transformation journey, most of the times.

Following post focuses on identifying common approaches and simplifying this journey into high level phases.

Modernization Approaches:

Application modernization can be a performed in different ways. Following sections summarize three approaches for application modernization. Each approach as its own pros and cons. These are mutually exclusive and an organization may choose one over other, based on various factors. As we proceed down, each modernization type require more and more efforts, but increased cloud-value.

Approach # 1: Lift and Shift

The easiest way to start modernizing your applications, is to Lift and Shift these servers to cloud. It may not be the ultimate modernized state, however it does start offering some benefits of clouds such as flexibility, pay as you go, limited (and mostly manual) scalability etc.,

The downside is, you will still be responsible for operations such as ensuring high availability, scaling, patching, and upgrades etc.,

Lift and Shift may be your first (optional) step towards cloud-native applications (the modernized applications). However actual modernization starts ahead with Re-platform (cloud optimized), Refactoring or Re-architecting the application components. Which are described below:

Approach # 2: Cloud-Optimized

Cloud-Optimized applications mainly refer to modernizing the applications by containerizing or moving them to managed-cloud offerings such as Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service etc..

Cloud-Optimized applications offer higher cloud value as:

• No re-architecting or new coding required
• Offer increased density & lower deployment cost
• Improved productivity and DevOps agility
• Portability of apps and dependencies
• High availability with Orchestrators

Microsoft explains the technologies involved in cloud-optimized applications here.

Containers mainly provide the runtime environment for applications. There are various containerization technologies available and containers can be hosted on multiple places in Azure, or even on-premise using Azure Kubernetes cluster on Azure Stack HCI

Monolithic applications can also take advantage of the cloud computing model by using a combination of containers, continuous delivery, and DevOp, referred as cloud-optimized.

Approach # 3: Microservices

This is where the cloud-value shines above all.

It requires a complete restructuring or decoupling of application components (from monolithic architecture) into small modules, deployed and managed independently (microservices architecture). So that failure of one loosely coupled component will not break the whole application.

These loosely coupled application components are integrated to each other using API interfaces, the Modern Architecture.

These changes to application, come at a high cost of significant code change/revamp but promises to offer long term agility, scalability, and high availability.

How to Kick-start the Journey?

It requires some time, thought process and efforts to walk this journey. It all starts with an assessment of existing applications which can help to identify the right destination for a particular application, and then the right path (may involve multiple hops/stages) to reach the identified destination.

Following decision tree may be helpful to devise the approach and destination of an application (to-be state):

Conclusion

Businesses / Enterprises today are compelled to be dynamic and efficient more than ever before. Enterprises are struggling to enhance and speed up the services deliver with improved quality and user experience in order to remain on top, or even in business.

Legacy technologies and applications slow down this whole process. Modern applications require agility, high availability, quicker updates and enhancements. Hence there is a dire need to modernize the applications by leveraging power of cloud and modern cloud technologies.

Application modernization not only enhance the overall experience, but open doors for new growth and reach opportunities, at scale.

It may be a time-taking process depending on complexity of each application part of the journey, however it is a walk worth walking. It is a need of the time for almost all enterprises. Enterprises should assess, categorize, shortlist and prioritize the applications and modernize them in an iterative manner on cloud of their choice, or even leveraging hybrid, multi-cloud or distributed cloud strategy for it.