Speed-up business-critical legacy applications with Application Containerization over the Cloud

Estimated reading time: 2 mins

Legacy applications, though business-critical, are less flexible and lack responsiveness. If they are beyond software support and patch-upgrade support then they also pose risk to the entire enterprise network. Mostly these legacy applications drive critical business processes and as a result, replacing them is deferred due to the fear of data corruption and data loss during the application migration. The scenario negatively impacts the processing speed and hampers even simple querying. This further depreciates the end-user or customer satisfaction. Enterprises are adopting Application Containerization over the Cloud to resolve the risks and constraints posed by the business-critical legacy applications. The market for Application Containers and Cloud Container Orchestration is expected to cross USD 4.98 billion by 2023. 

How does Application Containerization improve legacy application performance? 

Application Containers are encapsulations, which enclose loosely coupled microservices that work with clockwork precision, as one entity. Legacy applications and monoliths can be disintegrated into microservices and re-platformed over the Cloud by using containers. The entity delivers a seamless user experience that is orchestrated with Cloud Orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes.

Microservices are standalone functional application units and each one executes a specific function. The defect in one microservice does not impede the other. Each containerized microservice can be auto-scaled on the Cloud for fast execution and the microservices can run simultaneously without affecting the performance of each other.

As a result, Application Containerization over the Cloud improves the performance of legacy applications and monoliths by manifolds.

Significance of Application Containerization and Application Modernization

• Hyper-speed & computing power: Achieves super speed and performance as each microservice auto-scales as per requirement and many such microservices work concurrently to deliver the seamless user experience.
• Simplification: Simplifies the complexities of monoliths as each microservice works independently of the other.
• Resilience: Offers systemic resilience and failover such that enterprise avails continuous application availability with no downtime.
• Scalability: Allows auto-scaling each microservice and hence the performance and scalability of the entire application, as a whole.
• Portability: Allows to port the containerized application as a whole between different Cloud environments to avail the best Cloud Native features offered by different Cloud Service providers.
• Optimization & upgrades: Supports finetuning of each feature individually without impeding performance. Allows introducing new features and functionalities without downtime. 

Application Containers in the Hybrid Cloud environment

In the Hybrid Cloud environment, Application Containers allow to host the containerized application over the On-premise Cloud and use the Public Cloud services for Cloud bursting and performance scaling. They also allow porting the containerized application through different environments to suit business goals and enterprise budget, at different points in time.

Simply put

Microservices architecture and Application Containerization allows enterprises to simplify business-critical legacy applications. The ensemble also allows to hyper-scale the speed and performance of the application by taking advantage of the Cloud Native environment, especially on the Hybrid Cloud. As a result, it significantly improves business operations and customer satisfaction.

Next reading

• Improve speed of Business Critical Monoliths with Application Containers over the Cloud
• Jumpstart your Cloud journey with Distributed Cloud at the Edge and Cloud Managed Services
• Achieve Speed to Market with Application Modernization over the Cloud