APPLICATION MODERNIZATION
A successful application modernization strategy starts with the business need in mind and then focuses on technologies. As the journey to the cloud gathers pace, organizations have been looking for ways to accelerate cloud adoption and for a prescriptive approach to application modernization.
CLOUDlli approaches application modernization by dividing the roadmap into discrete increments focusing on three phases: assess, modernize, and manage. This article discusses the strategy for assessing and modernizing applications based on our Professional Services team's years of experience helping enterprise AWS customers in their cloud adoption and application modernization projects.
OUR APPROACH
Modernizing your applications helps you reduce costs, gain efficiencies, and make the most of your existing investments. It involves a multi-dimensional approach to adopt and use new technology, to deliver portfolio, application, and infrastructure value faster, and to position your organization to scale at an optimal price. After you optimize your applications, you must operate in that new, modernized model without disruption to simplify your business operations, architecture, and overall engineering practices.
Migrating applications to AWS by using the rehosting (lift and shift) approach doesn’t automatically give you the benefits of the elasticity, resiliency, ease of deployment and management, and flexibility that AWS offers. Nor does it automatically modernize your culture and processes to enable high-performing software development. Modernization means taking your application environment in the form that it’s in today (most likely, legacy and monolithic) and transforming it into something that is more agile, elastic, and highly available. In doing so, you can transform your business into a modern enterprise.
To optimize your cloud adoption and migration, you must first assess and evaluate your enterprise for readiness. After you assess the readiness of your organization, you can:
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Select one or two applications.
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Modernize those applications so that you can maintain, extend, deploy, and manage them in a way that meets the current and future needs of your business.
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Establish a foundation for modernization at scale through the hands-on experience you gained in the previous two steps. In this phase, you can create a complete modernization solution by determining the supporting infrastructure, application middleware, middleware services (such as databases, queuing software, integration software, and other technologies), and other components.
The iterative approach to application modernization discussed in this article can be divided into three high-level phases: assess, modernize, and manage.
MODERNIZATION SERVICES
UTILIZING AWS 7PS FRAMEWORK
The AWS application modernization 7 Ps is a framework that AWS (Amazon Web Services) uses to help customers modernize their applications. The 7 Ps are:
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Portfolio: Assess your application portfolio to identify which applications to modernize and in what order.
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Platform: Choose the right platform for your application modernization needs, whether that's containers, serverless, or other cloud-native technologies.
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Principles: Define the principles and best practices that will guide your modernization efforts, such as automation, security, and scalability.
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Processes: Define the processes that will help you modernize your applications efficiently, such as agile development, continuous integration and deployment, and DevOps.
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People: Build a team with the right skills and expertise to support your modernization efforts, such as architects, developers, and operations personnel.
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Performance: Define performance metrics and goals to measure the success of your modernization efforts, such as improved user experience, reduced costs, and faster time-to-market.
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Proof: Use a proof of concept (PoC) to validate your modernization approach and demonstrate the value of your modernized applications.
By following the AWS application modernization 7 Ps framework, organizations can develop a comprehensive approach to modernizing their applications, which can help them achieve greater agility, efficiency, and innovation in the cloud.
Phase 1: The Assess Phase
ASSESS
The first step in an organization’s modernization journey is to analyze the existing application portfolio, assess the systems that need modernization, and identify the technical solutions required. In this phase, you can use the application modernization questionnaire to assess and rationalize the applications portfolio and determine the business, functional, technical, and financial significance (the strategic value) of applications in the portfolio. This will determine how well the organization can support the future state architecture when it’s built.
Phase 1: The Modernize Phase
MODERNIZE
During this phase, you determine project goals and resource requirements, and you build out the implementation roadmap. The goal is to revitalize your applications by using a modernization program that creates a modern, agile application architecture.
Phase 1: The Modernize Phase
MANAGE
Relearning efforts are embedded in all modernization activities to give you a detailed understanding of application characteristics and to reduce any risks that subsequent modernization efforts might cause. Application workloads still need to be able to exploit platform services so that application teams can understand and optimize the runtime characteristics of their application workloads. This means that application teams should treat the operational features of modernized applications like all other application features, and microservice operations effectively become part of engineering. Embracing this DevOps culture in cloud-native operations as part of building an organization's site reliability engineering (SRE) capability is essential to successful modernization adoption. The management phase includes effective change management, program management, quality assurance, and service excellence.
