Estimated reading time: 4 mins
Key takeaways from this blogIn 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.
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.
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.
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.
Cloud Application Modernization offers application resilience and scalability, and much more through the natural adoption of the Cloud Native –
|
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.
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.