How Cloud-Native Can Simplify Legacy App Modernization
Pain points of legacy app modernization and how to leverage the cloud’s potential.
The “lift and shift” status quo of modernizing legacy apps into the cloud simply perpetuates enterprise risk and technical debt. Keith Neilson of AppFactor discusses how new cloud-native techniques can better refactor and migrate apps to solve these issues and drive more value.
Legacy applications are a fact of life for any major enterprise. But sooner or later, the need to strategically refactor and modernize these apps becomes unavoidable to remain competitive and realign existing applications to progressive business processes. Unfortunately, today’s status quo for app modernization is marked by under-funded, under-strategized and excessively manual processes. This scenario creates a costly snowball effect of growing misalignment between cloud technologies and legacy systems, busted architectures, technical debt, security gaps and performance issues.
To get past this status quo, organizations must mature how they leverage the cloud for app modernization. Let’s explore the benefits of putting a more holistic, data-intensive and cloud-native development lens on the challenge of legacy app refactoring and re-architecting. In doing so, we’ll see the crucial difference a more cloud-native approach makes in whether an organization succeeds or fails in the essential journey toward a more agile, secure and scalable operation.
The Pain Points of App Modernization
Today’s competitive markets and tight resources require both private and public sector enterprises to squeeze more reliability and efficiency than ever from their IT estates. That makes the prospect of mission-critical business apps continuing to run on legacy or end-of-life technology a disaster in the making. Organizations can’t afford outdated or underperforming apps as the Achilles heel perpetuates risk, inefficiency and downtime in the IT enterprise.
Few problems are solved, however, when apps are modernized in today’s inadequate status quo of manually refactoring and migrating legacy apps. This process is hampered by human error and a lack of scalability and speed. Such limitations bring about poor observability and understanding of app dependencies, missing knowledge and inadequate documentation from aging estates, and longer deployment times from lack of resources and repeatability.
These combined problems translate into tremendous costs from latency and downtime whenever poorly-maintained apps break and cause a freeze or slowdown in operations. The issue is far from hypothetical: A typical outage can cost an enterprise more than $300,000 per hour, with some outages costing between $1 million and $5 million per hour.
Unfortunately, the problem is widespread and growing all the time. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 90% of current applications will still be in use, with a whopping 40% of IT budgets devoted simply to maintaining technical debt. As a “path of least resistance” to get to the cloud, some organizations pursue “lift and shift” migrations that merely relocate the problems from on-prem servers to cloud hosts. This simply perpetuates the pitfalls of technical debt, poor architecture and poor cloud utilization.
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Learning to Leverage the Full Benefits of the Cloud
The lesson from all the above challenges is that just being in the cloud is not enough; you must go further to embrace cloud-native paradigms for modernizing legacy apps. The key is to fully leverage the computing flexibility that containerization, serverless, WebAssembly and relevant architecture patterns like microservices make possible in the cloud and then scale these cloud-native development techniques with the help of automation.
The ideal app modernization approach is a holistic development and transformation methodology that leverages automation to scale intelligent, repeatable processes across every stage of the application modernization process. Cloud-native technologies and tooling can and should be applied across the entire lifecycle from initial discovery to migration, deployment and ongoing maintenance.
What does this approach look like? At the assessment phase, you typically see rigorous mapping of asset metadata, dependencies, technical debt and compliance contingencies – all attributes defining how a new anatomy and application architecture should be built in the cloud. Next, applications should be decomposed into new cloud-native architectures built iteratively so that enhanced technology can be steadily applied to existing apps in production to improve their performance and security posture.
The deployment phase should ideally be rolled out with the help of highly automated, target-agnostic schema and low-code platforms for speed, agility and accessibility. Post-deployment, ongoing maintenance is facilitated with agile CI/CD frameworks to optimize the deployment and monitor technical debt over time continually. At every stage, automation tools should be in place to support these processes securely and efficiently at scale.
Key Elements of the Successful Approach
While every firm will have to customize its approach to the unique business and functional requirements that define the app modernization to-do list for that particular organization, there are some common capabilities to shoot for in standing up your system for cloud-native, automated app refactoring and re-architecture.
To begin with, organizations should build in the observability to continuously track drift and precisely flag when and where the technical debt arises. Your modernization program should also be able to iteratively update application architectures with the latest cloud-native developments to adapt to changing business needs and technical dynamics. The best solutions even include reusable templates for repeatable and governed service modernization enhancements. This allows for future platform integration that brings new technologies like AI/ML, WASM, IoT and edge integrations to the enterprise IT estate.
In addition, the right workforce processes and culture are critical priorities in adopting a more cloud-native approach to legacy app modernization. Developers and cloud engineers need to embrace an accelerated DevOps approach that quickly inducts legacy apps into continuous improvement and continuous delivery pipelines. Test and release cycles are also sped up significantly. Armed with the right approach, transformation teams can reduce app redeployment times from days to minutes – rapidly spinning up environments for production, development and ongoing quality assurance.
Finally, no amount of cloud-native innovation is worth the effort if it comes at the expense of security. That’s why modernization efforts should be generated in a secure environment, with the ability to upgrade underlying runtime versions to cut dependence on outdated software. There should also be secure, modernized on-premise targets for mission-critical and sensitive applications not yet destined for the public cloud. And across the entire modernization effort, leading practices for automated identity, access management and attack surface controls should be honored.
Cloud-native Futureproofing
The need for legacy application modernization is unavoidable for any organization looking to transform digitally. But when done correctly by combining the latest cloud-native modernization techniques and advanced automation, organizations can slash migration times and manage technical debt to stay ahead of the legacy curve. In doing so, they also futureproof the enterprise with iterative cycles of accelerated innovation, dramatic growth and exponential value generation over time.
What challenges are you facing in modernizing your legacy apps? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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