This is a continuation of a series of articles on Application Modernization. In this section, we take a slightly different perspective on Build-Deploy-Run aspect of the new software.

When we modernize an existing application, we can ease our move to the cloud with the full promise of cloud technology. With a cloud native microservice approach, scalability and flexibility inherent to the cloud can be taken advantage of.  Modernizing the cloud native applications enables applications to run concurrently and seamlessly connect with existing investments. Barriers that prohibit productivity and integration are removed.

One of the tenets of modernizing involves "Build-once-and-deploy-on-any-cloud". This process begins with assessing the existing application, building the applications quickly, automating the deployments for productivity and run and consistently manage the modernized application.

Identifying applications that can be readily moved into the cloud platform and those that require refactoring is the first step because the treatments of lift-and-shift and refactoring are quite different. Leveraging containers as the foundation for applications and services is another aspect.

Automating deployments for productivity with a DevOps pipeline makes it quick and reliable.  A common management approach to consolidate operations for all applications ensure faster problem resolution.

When the application readiness is assessed, there are four tracks of investigation: cloud migration, cost reduction, agile delivery and innovation resulting in vms in the cloud for migration purposes or containers for repackaging, replatforming and refactoring respectively - all of these in the build phase of the build-deploy and run. While VMs are handled by migration accelerators in the deploy phases, the containers are handled by the modern DevOps pipelines in the deploy phase. The modern application runtimes for containers are also different from the common operations on vms between the migration and modernization paths in the run phase. Finally, the migration results in a complex relocated traditional application while the modernization results in traditional application via repackaging, cloud ready application via replatforming and cloud native application via refactoring.