Improvements to Azure from application modernization purposes:

As fears for a global slowdown are gripping the tech industry, organizations planning their digital transformation must do more with less.  Two improvements are suggested to the Azure public cloud in this essay. First, the development of a tool that can extract the interfaces from legacy applications source code and stage them for a microservice transformation. Second, the rollout of a pre-assembled and pre-configured set of Azure resources that makes it easy to deploy various applications.

Azure already has significant innovations as a cost-effective differentiation from its nearest competitor and these two improvements will help those organizations with a charter for cloud adoption to make the leap.

Azure has claims to provide savings of up to 54% over running applications on-premises and 35% over running them on AWS as per their media reports. Streamlined operations, simplified administration and proximity are the other additional benefits. Built-in tools from Visual Studio and MSSQL provide convenience to migrations for applications and databases respectively. The differentiating features for Azure over its competitor for the purposes of such savings include the Hybrid benefit and the TCO calculator. The Hybrid Benefit is a licensing offer that helps migration to Azure by applying existing licenses to Windows Azure, SQL Server and Linux subscriptions. Additionally, services like Azure Arc help to use Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Stack for Hyperconverged clustering solution to run virtualized workloads on-premises which makes it easy to consolidate aging infrastructure and connect to Azure for cloud services.  The TCO calculator helps to understand the cost areas that affect the current applications today such as server hardware, software licenses, electricity, and labor. It recommends a set of equivalent services in Azure that will support the applications and helps to create a customized business case to justify migration to Azure. All it takes is a set of three steps: enter a few details about the current infrastructure, review the assumptions and receive a summary with supporting analysis.

The features asked here include analysis for legacy applications that can explain how to convert the applications to a microservice architecture. An extractor that generates the KDM model from legacy application code can be automated by virtue of understanding the interfaces and whether they are candidates for segregation into microservices. Dedicated parsers can help with this code-to-model transformation. The restructuring phase aims at deriving an enriched conceptual technology independent specification of the legacy system in a knowledge model KDM from the information stored inside the models generated on the previous phase. KDM is an OMG standard and can involve up to four layers: Infrastructure layer, Program Elements layer, resource layer and abstractions layer. Each layer is dedicated to a particular application viewpoint. The forward engineering is a process of moving from high-level abstractions by means of transformational techniques to automatically obtain representation on a new platform such as microservices or as constructs in a programming language such as interfaces and classes. Even the user interface can go through forward engineering into a Rich single page application with a new representation describing the organization and positioning of components. Segregation of interfaces into microservices is easier with well-known patterns such as model-view-controller. Data access, profiling and instrumentation or bookkeeping at interface level can also add useful information to the organization of interfaces for the purpose of extracting microservices. Software measurement metamodels have played a significant role in forward engineering.

The second ask is about the deployment of hosts and resources native to the cloud. Azure can provide dedicated blueprints that include policies and templates for the purposes of hosting a specific type of modernized application. Microservices, for instance, requires load balancers, cache, containers, ingress and data connections and a modernized application can be more easily deployed when the developers do not have to author the infrastructure and can rely on pre-assembled resources specific to their needs. Azure Service Fabric became a veritable resource to suit such purpose but the ask here is to create a blueprint that also establishes the size of the stamp.

These asks are like full-service for application migration and modernization teams.