by Sachin Rane, on Jul 15, 2022 3:58:44 PM
Estimated reading time: 4 mins
Key takeaways from this blog- Move beyond simple lift and shift of legacy applications to the Cloud. Harness the power of Cloud Native instead of just Cloud Computing.
- Adopt DevSecOps as an inherent trait of the Cloud Application Modernization of business-critical legacy applications.
- Microservices architecture and Containerization offer umpteen opportunities for hyper-accelerated application upgrades.
In a fast-developing technology world, business-critical applications assume the tag of legacy sooner. In such scenarios, maintaining the application integrity and security in the technologically interconnected business landscape becomes an arduous uphill task. Retiring or replacing these applications is less cost-efficient or reliable due to the integral threats of data loss or data corruption. Cloud Application Modernization is a faster and more reliable alternative to continuing the use of on-premise business-critical applications. A simple Cloud Migration, though, means a Lift and Shift; Cloud Application Modernization implicitly means an evident transformation to and adoption of the Cloud Native environment, which has inherent advantages compared to a Lift and Shift model.
What is Cloud Application Modernization?
Cloud Application Modernization is refactoring and repurposing on-premise legacy applications to the Cloud Native environment to suit specific business requirements of application responsiveness, scalability, and resilience. It is crucial for business-critical on-premise legacy applications that otherwise threaten the coexisting business landscape due to the lack of patch upgrades.
Cloud Application Modernization is the most cost-efficient and reliable method for safely using a legacy application while realizing the benefits of new architectures, technology platforms, and scalable frameworks. It extends the application's lifespan and allows to take advantage of the Cloud Native environment for technology innovation.
What is Cloud Native, and how does it enable Cloud Application Modernization?
Cloud Native is a concept where the application environment constitutes discreet modules called microservices. These modules are reusable and easily modifiable. Each microservice is standalone and independent of the other and depicts one particular functionality of the application. The microservices are the building blocks of the Cloud Native application and are packaged in containers. Containerization allows easy portability of the application between different Cloud Native environments, such as AWS, Azure, IBM, etc. The Cloud Native allows to independently modify, scale, and tune each microservice. It orchestrates a number of microservices that act synchronously to drive the overall application function through an orchestration mechanism, such as Kubernetes, Ansible, Salt, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Puppet, etc.
Cloud Native environment is one of the force-multipliers and strategic technology trends. It enables Cloud Application Modernization. It allows a bottom-up approach to refactoring an on-premise legacy application on the Cloud step-by-step. Each legacy application functionality is disintegrated and rebuilt on the Cloud as one microservice. Many such loosely coupled microservices work in perfect clockwork under the helm of an orchestration mechanism. Where an on-premise application has limited scope, the Cloud Native environment enables it to achieve limitless scalability and processing power.
Why is Cloud Application Modernization not synonymous with Cloud Migration?
Cloud Application Modernization contrasts Cloud Migration, which essentially means a simple Lift and Shift without engaging the benefits of the Cloud Native. However, it is possible for the Cloud-migrated application to be refactored through a bottom-up approach by restructuring the application and engaging the microservices architecture, application containers, application orchestration, and increasing levels of automation.
Top 9 reasons for Cloud Application Modernization
Cloud Application Modernization offers application resilience and scalability, and much more through the natural adoption of the Cloud Native –
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- Deliver business agility: Cloud Application Modernization improves the application's responsiveness by manifolds. It brings in a high level of application velocity that is beyond the purview of on-premise applications.
- Future proof your application: It transforms your business application by incorporating feature upgrades at a hyper-accelerated pace. The Cloud Native environment allows going live with new features from conceptualization, development, testing, and production within hours.
- Save CapEx costs: It frees up the time, space, and resources required to host and maintain the on-premise legacy application. It eliminates the costs of licensing, patching, and infrastructure upgrades.
- Drive efficiencies: It drives cultural changes and improves business efficiencies. It supports an agile and innovative culture. It allows engaging more OpenSource technologies while shifting to DevOps from the Waterfall model, which is a paradigm shift.
- Increase productivity and mobility: It gives a tremendous fillip to operations and productivity as well as offers real-time synchronization with mobility solutions.
- Improve operational scalability: Cloud Application Modernization improves the application scalability compared to legacy and on-premise applications. It offers seamless elasticity of operations by scaling up or down as per business requirements.
- Reduce security incidents: Cloud Application Modernization considers security protocols at each layer during application development/refactoring while moving towards a DevSecOps paradigm.
- Discover new process efficiencies: The new approach frees up time for dealing with on-premise application operations issues. It enables the business to reduce spending on OpEx related to rectifying application issues.
- Differentiate with real-time insights: It drives real-time data synchronization. It offers businesses the competitive differentiation of retrieving real-time insights for impromptu decision-making and insights-driven decisions.
Two prominent methods for Application Modernization
Cloud Application Modernization is driven by the concepts of Containerization and Microservices. These Cloud Native pillars allow businesses to adopt two routes – Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud. Hybrid Cloud distributes operations across On-premise Cloud and Public Cloud, whereas Multi-Cloud operations are spread over multiple Public Clouds.
First-time Cloud adopters choose Multi-Cloud operations in order to experiment firsthand with the offerings of multiple Cloud service providers that best suit their business requirements. However, Hybrid Cloud offers Near-edge and more practical Cloud solutions that suit the requirements of most industries that have to deal with sensitive data.
Simply put
Cloud Application Modernization enables businesses to tide over the shortcomings of on-premise business-critical legacy applications. It incorporates high scalability and application velocity to suit the requirements of dynamic business environments. Microservices architecture and Containerization paradigms allow the incorporation of new features and upgrades within hours compared to months for on-premise applications that follow the Waterfall development model. Cloud Application Modernization allows to drive process efficiencies and scale new avenues of business productivity.
