Application Modernization goes together with cutting costs. Containers and Microservices lower costs not as an afterthought but with the design decision itself. The modernization journey has many approaches between assessment phase and deployment. These can be graded as follows:

1.       Containerizing the whole application simplifies the transition to the cloud. This is a migration-based approach that takes the least toll.

2.       Exposing on-premises assets with API helps to replace a monolith with SaaS. This strategy works well for legacy assets that are difficult to move to the cloud.

3.       When costs must be driven even lower, refactoring the monolith into the services helps a lot.

4.       It might even make sense to add new microservices, to innovate incrementally, reduce complexity, and establish success early. This is a transform and innovate approach.

5.       Finally, with agile delivery, we can sunset the monolith we started out with.

It helps to increase the delivery velocity throughout the modernization journey with one or more of these approaches.

A trusted foundation often helps with re-platforming.  Container platforms like Kubernetes and OpenShift help both the developers and the operations Staff. Native cloud services are also popular for certain resources and for hosting. Often with a continuous integration and continuous deployment involving infrastructure-as-a-code, the destination can be one or another cloud requiring the investment only once. Modernization platforms, tools and services are not mature yet to the point where they onboard customer legacy applications directly so must be done by hand today and possibly with container platforms and other cloud resources.

Application, data, integration, automation, multi-cloud management, and security are all considered to enable a faster and more reliable way to move to the cloud.