Application Modernization

Organizations that continue to run legacy applications based on old, pre-cloud-age architectures find that doing so comes at a high price. The resulting poor, unfriendly, and non-personalized user experience fails to motivate customers to purchase the company’s products and services. These characteristics undermine an organization’s competitiveness, causing lost market share and revenue. To survive in the cloud era, it’s essential that all organizations modernize their applications.

Cloud service providers today offer a portfolio of solutions to streamline the process of modernizing applications. But first, organizations must choose which of three modernization approaches to adopt:

Lift & Shift – Move the app as is from the old environment (such as a local server) to a new infrastructure, such as the public cloud. This is without any, or minimal, changes to the code. The new infrastructure improves application performance but does not resolve limitations or alter legacy characteristics.

Re-platforming/cloud migration – This approach replaces or modifies certain elements of the application (such as the backend database) to take full advantage of the cloud; no changes to the code or architecture are integrated into the new application.

Refactoring – Moving from a monolithic structure to microservices. This approach suits organizations that want to fully modernize an application, and requires redesigning it and rewriting broad parts of the code, to adapt it to a private or public cloud environment. In this process, a monolithic application is broken down into a series of separate and unrelated microservices taking maximal advantage of the natural cloud infrastructure and cloud tools. The result is higher-quality software and expedited integration of new changes demanded by market needs. This long and expensive process is not necessarily suitable, or even necessary, for every legacy application.

A typical application modernization solution will include the following components:

– Cloud computing power providing fast, flexible, and elastic access to the cloud infrastructure resources (private or public) needed to develop and run applications.

– Containers – These are a kind of virtual machine that only run the application code, without the operating system and supporting applications. This method streamlines and accelerates application development, upgrades, and distribution.

– Kubernetes – An open-source mobile container platform that eliminates most manual processes involved in installing and deploying applications.

– Microservices – An architectural approach to developing applications as a collection of small services, each implementing certain business capabilities and run as a separate process. Each microservice can be installed, upgraded, scaled, and restarted independently of the other microservices in the application, enabling the live implementation of updates without any disruption to users.

Over the years, ABnet Communication has supported thousands of organizations in modernizing their applications. Our expertise is at the disposal of every organization and distributor that wants to make this critical move quickly and efficiently.