Application modernization has grown to mean many things over the years, and rightfully so. There are so many different applications, different patterns, different use cases, and different business needs that make it impossible to have a one size fits all. Modernization needs an initiating issue – cost, application bugs, scaling issues, not enough developer velocity, or integrations are all common reasons we see in the industry. Once you determine your initiator, then you can start to build your path forward.
In this blog, we will describe some common modernization patterns. Even though there’s no one-size-fits-all method for modernization there are some proven strategies that can be implemented on a small or large scale based on your needs. We can help you evaluate and assemble the combination of patterns below and help you implement the best strategy to modernize your applications.
What does a modernized app look like?
Modernized apps use modern languages, frameworks, architectures, interfaces, and cloud services. We can also define a modern application by looking at what it is not. The opposite of modern applications are generally referred to as legacy applications. Legacy applications are when the symbiotic relationship between a business and its technology starts to suffer. Legacy applications are generally a product of time and what was a cutting edge application yesterday might be preventing the business from advancing today. Whether it be cost to maintain, lack of features, inability to keep up with the market – times change, business needs change, and technology should change to keep up with those.
Regardless of the reason, when technology becomes parasitic to the business, then you have a legacy application. Let’s review a few of the most common issues legacy applications possess that can hold a business back and that modernization can help solve.
Painful deployments are by far one of the most common pain points and often companies and their engineers don’t realize how painful they are until they see the other side. These deployments might be defined by maintenance windows and have a manual, error-prone deployment process that requires a QA team on standby to check every few steps to ensure nothing goes wrong.
Another common pain point, and one that really affects the financials, is scaling. Legacy applications generally lack the ability to scale up quickly based on demand. Once they do scale up they rarely get scaled down. These legacy infrastructures are provisioned for 110% of max capacity to be ready for that spike, but they are provisioned at that scale 24/7, costing the business money and wasting resources.
A pain point often tied to scaling is an application’s statefulness. Statefulness requires users to always access the same server because their session information or maybe even their specific user information is stored locally on that server. With a stateful application any disruption in service or even a slight blip can lead to destructive failures where users are kicked out of the application and required to login again. User experience is increasingly becoming a driver that determines if a user will return to your application, and a legacy, stateful application will lead to poor user experience.
Modern applications generally possess the opposite of all of the above.
Modern applications solve painful deployments because they are deployed using automation in an extremely repeatable fashion. This deployment automation typically includes both the application source code as well as the underlying infrastructure as code using tools like Terraform, AWS Cloud Development Kit, or AWS CloudFormation. These deployments are also normally coupled with extensive automated testing which provides extreme confidence for a successful deployment.
Modern applications are cost-efficient not only in their approach to architecture but also in their approach to scaling. They solve the scaling problem by scaling up only when demand requires it and scaling back down during non-peak times, which enables the business to save money.
Modern applications are also stateless, allowing them not only to scale but also to fail gracefully should there be any hardware failures or unexpected issues.
This is a very short list describing a modern application, but it provides a view into what the possibilities hold.
Seven strategies for modernizing applications
Below, we will define a few of the most common strategies for modernizing your application. As stated above, there is no one-size-fits-all method or even necessarily a one-size-fits-an entire application method. Sometimes one application can take on a few different strategies for different parts of the application to allow for the best end result.
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