Before we modernize an application for a business, we must make an inventory of the application and how it aligns with business priorities. This will help to determine the best technical path to modernization and take an assessment of the effort required.

Application modernization is business modernization.  It must align to business priorities and then needs that are driving the business to modernize the application.

The current application portfolio must be analyzed. The operational and application readiness checklist assesses several dozens of characteristics. This helps with the data driven and quantitative analysis for an approach to modernization.

The financial impacts and assessments for the benefits of migrating workloads from on-premises to a cloud versus modernizing must be studied with a TCO calculator.

These help to gather meaningful and actionable insights that will help to determine and articulate the impacts of the modernization and cloud strategies in alignment with business goals.

Containerizing the application in a container image is often a necessary step towards modernization, but many applications may not be optimized for containers. Load balancing, application state handling, and monitoring are different in containerized applications. As a result, some rewrite of the application might be required. Similarly, performance tuning and DevOps processes must be aligned to containers. By moving from traditional runtimes to cloud runtimes, certain technical debt is automatically removed.

Once the application has been launched in a container, certain steps automatically follow. Accelerators might be required to adapt the application to a containerized environment. Pre-built containerized middleware and services support that journey. The DevOps and configuration must also be modernized. Pipelines for new applications as well as orchestration tools that automate configuration must be generated and used.

Managing and monitoring the operations based on open container technologies help to consolidate and standardize operations.

Both migrating and modernizing application platforms must be large and complex effort. A cloud-first framework helps with a strategy and involves building cloud native microservices, extending with new services, and migrating unchanged applications, and adopting standardized operations. Refactoring helps to decreased development as a monolith and increase development as microservices. Curated development tools and practice help making the transition smoother.