Application Modernization Field Guide

Part 7 discussed modernization via incremental approaches and using tools.

This section summarizes the field guide for general application modernizations.

Application modernization is about reverse engineering, restructuring and forward engineering. It is also an opportunity to optimize the user experience through modernization. Customers are vital to business. Applications have become the gateway to more impactful and rewarding experiences for internal stakeholders and customers. Modernization is not just one of the ways but sometimes the only way for applications to embrace agility, fuel growth and remain competitive.

The points listed here are all elements of a robust hybrid cloud strategy and are essential for a full modernization experience. They can be used to accelerate digital transformations by building new capabilities and delivering them. Cloud native architectures and containerizations are priorities. Delivery must be accelerated with a culture of automation and transformation and deployments must be friendly to hybrid clouds.

One of the most critical aspects of application modernization is application readiness assessment. A cloud-native microservices approach can bring scalability and flexibility inherent to the hybrid cloud but it relies on an evaluation of the existing application. It also brings the opportunity to tailor the application to the business needs.

The build once and deploy on any cloud begins with assessing the applications. Some of them can undergo lift-and-shift while others will require refactoring. Even if the applications are deployed with little changes, preparing them for containerization is essential. Containers bring scalability, openness and portability. Automating deployments via a CI/CD pipeline is next. DevOps pipelines are very welcome here. Applications must be run and managed with ease for true embrace by customers.

Accelerators and tools can certainly help but recognizing the disciplines in which they will be used are just as important. For example, Innovation helps with refactoring which can help deliver a cloud-native application. Agile delivery can help with replatform that when deployed by modern devOps pipelines and run by newer runtimes can help deliver a cloud ready application. Cost reduction is another distinct area where repackaging can help save costs if a traditional application is delivered. Cloud Migration that requires VMs in the cloud and when used with migration accelerators and common operations can help deliver complex traditional applications in the new world.

There is not a single formula that holds but an approach that is totally unique to the business goals and needs. The modernization goals of agile delivery, transform-and-innovate, reduce costs, replace with SaaS, and cloud migrations can be planned for by analyzing for insights and the utilization of one or more modernization patterns that include pivoting from monolithic strategies, adding new capabilities as microservices, refactoring monolith to microservices, exposing APIs, and migrating monolith to a cloud runtime. With these, applications can be deployed to both a public cloud and a private cloud.

A trusted foundation helps. Infrastructure platforms like Kubernetes and cloud technologies like AWS developer tools provide a consistent platform to leverage for this purpose.