Legacy application modernization strategy becomes crucial in the software space. With digital transformation occurring rapidly everywhere, organizations are compelled to proactively monitor changing technology trends and user requirements, often necessitating the dynamic upgrading and deploying of software at an unprecedented scale.
This blog discusses the key strategies to modernize your applications and infrastructure for a successful digital strategy.
Legacy application modernization is a software approach to modernizing applications and the underlying infrastructure. Thanks to it, businesses gain the required flexibility and agility to realign business solutions to meet changing user requirements quickly. Simply put, it is about updating the software stack using modern languages, frameworks, infrastructure platforms, and cloud native application environments.
A legacy application modernization strategy involves implementing modern software development approaches such as DevOps, CI/CD, SRE, etc. Breaking and moving monolithic software into a microservices architecture or a serverless architecture and migrating legacy workloads to highly popular Kubernetes-based modern cloud platforms, too. It is important to note that the legacy software is not always replaced here but improved and enhanced.
The biggest reason for businesses not being able to leverage digital advancements is legacy systems. According to Computer Weekly, 90% of businesses have limits in terms of digital innovation because of legacy systems. A majority of legacy apps use monolithic architecture wherein the entire software is built as a single large code.
Monolithic apps come with several challenges. As each development phase is dependent on the previous phase, the process is time-consuming. Similarly, alterations to requirements or design get complex. If a feature has to be added or modified, it is necessary to update the entire application and pass it through different phases of the waterfall model.
Likewise, scaling is difficult as you have to scale the entire application when a single component needs additional resources. It means all components of the application consume high resources even when they don’t need them, resulting in severe resource wastage.
Changes to a single component can affect the entire application and complicate deployment. While development cycles get slower, maintenance gets complex as each change requires retesting the entire app. Moreover, monolithic architectures limit you from adopting new technologies and frameworks and thereby deny flexibility and agility in business processes.
From a business perspective, a few of its challenges include server upgrades and overprovisioning infrastructure costs, and application downtime for maintenance. License costs for 3rd party integrations, security compliance, and finding the right people to manage legacy software can also be included.
An app modernization strategy helps organizations improve software quality, increase the frequency of software deployments, and leverage the latest technologies.
Here are a few benefits of legacy application modernization:
Modern applications with microservices architecture and DevOps for cloud environments bring greater agility, flexibility, and scalability to the table. They enable developers to quickly, frequently, and securely make changes to the apps as per user requirements and changing market needs.
Cloud environments augmented by DevOps and Microservices architecture facilitate seamless collaboration between various teams right through the app development life cycle. Additionally, access to modern tools and technologies increases productivity while eliminating a single point of failure.
Read the blog DevOps Strategy to learn how to incorporate into your application modernization strategy
As developers add new features to applications, businesses accrue a lot of technical debt over time. However, modernized apps reduce this technical debt and thereby increase the quality of software while delivering a better ROI.
Similar to IT teams, operations teams benefit from the flexibility, agility, and scalability offered by an app modernization strategy. Operations teams can handle dynamically changing workloads to offer high availability and a better user experience.
Contrary to traditional application development, wherein security is added at the last phase, modern applications are built using CI/CD practices. It means security professionals are also a part of the application development right from the beginning. As such, apps are secure against every type of cyber attack and threat.
As new technologies streamline operations and improve application performance efficiencies effectively, they reduce maintenance and downtimes. Moreover, it helps teams achieve optimal resource usage.
DevOps and cloud environments facilitate automated compliance checks and thereby help organizations eliminate penalties. They simplify audits and guarantee security.
Modernizing an app involves moving it from an on-premise solution to a cloud-native environment. This shift enables organizations to leverage the benefits of cloud technology and seamlessly integrate with other cloud services. Teams can also collaborate effectively with others operating in the cloud, utilize elastic resources, and take advantage of flexible subscription models.
Modern application development environments empower developers with the flexibility to innovate and experiment with new features. As such, they can design highly intuitive user interfaces that offer simple navigation and easy-to-use functionality, ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
With cloud and DevOps-based CI/CD practices, organizations can frequently build and release quality code. Moreover, services of a microservices-based app communicate via APIs, which means a function can be individually modified without disrupting the entire app.
As such, they gain speed to market, optimize resource usage, and reduce operational and maintenance costs while moving ahead of the competition.
With clear insights into application performance and resource utilization, businesses can make informed decisions to dynamically realign strategies and stay relevant in the market.
Businesses tend to continue with legacy apps as they are familiar with them and feel they are reliable. However, legacy apps pose serious security and performance issues in the long run.
The first step towards legacy application modernization is assessing your actual legacy infrastructure and apps.
Here are a few legacy application modernization examples:
As a part of this assessment, check out the application’s pain points, functionality limits, and create your business objectives. Said objectives will later be converted into technical objectives and modernization milestones.
As a best practice, seek input from all stakeholders, app users, and everyone involved with the app. Some aspects to note are the app’s full stack technology, all dependencies, languages, libraries, databases, dataflow, architecture, inbound/outbound interfaces, and other shared services. Consider security and audit requirements as well.
Keeping these details in mind, prepare a legacy application modernization roadmap that should involve the modernization approach, implementing technologies/frameworks, project scope, deliverables, milestones, etc. Don’t ignore the time and the budget in your legacy application modernization strategy.
Designing the right legacy application modernization strategy is key to successfully leveraging modern technologies. Here are the 5 most common and successful approaches (also known as 5 ‘R’s) to legacy application modernization.
Rehosting, or “lift-and-shift,” involves migrating an application from one environment to another without modifying its design.
For example, a business that runs a legacy customer relationship management (CRM) application on its own servers in its data center can rehost the app to leverage the scalability and reduced maintenance costs associated with cloud computing.
The rehosting process would involve the following steps:
Remember, rehosting doesn’t involve changing the application’s code – the application merely moves to a new environment. This is often a first step towards a more cloud-native approach, allowing organizations to realize some benefits of the cloud while planning more extensive modernization in the future.
Rearchitecting is about changing the structure and design of an app to suit new environments. Legacy apps are mostly monolithic in design, and re-architecting often involves changing it to microservices architecture.
For example, a company has an e-commerce application running on traditional on-premise servers. While the application works well, it’s not scalable enough to handle peak demand during high-traffic periods, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
To resolve this issue, developers break the large and single code into smaller services wherein each service performs a single function, and each service is an independent and modular code. As such, you can separately update, deploy, and manage each service. It can also consume resources using APIs. You can independently scale a service instead of upgrading the entire app, and it can leverage CI/CD, agile, DevOps, PaaS, and serverless technologies in the cloud.
Rearchitecting involves changing the entire app architecture. On the other hand, refactoring is about moving the app to the cloud with significant changes to the source code, databases, and other dependencies to suit the cloud environment.
Said approach is the most complex one as you are making changes to source code, configuration, and infrastructure susceptible to errors. Consequently, you should ensure that code changes do not negatively affect the functionality.
However, it is worth the time and effort as you gain long-term savings, increase resilience, reduce technical debt and operational costs, and dynamically adapt to changing app requirements. It helps you to increase the app performance without altering the functionality, leveraging PaaS offerings.
Rebuilding keeps the scope and specifications of the app and builds the components of the applications right from scratch. For this, it uses new technologies, frameworks, and programming languages in a PaaS environment.
Furthermore, rebuilding helps in building apps faster, reduces operational costs, and accelerates innovation. You can choose this option when you don’t possess the necessary technical expertise or the budget to refactor or re-architect an app.
As the name suggests, a replacement approach retires a legacy on-premise application and replaces it with a cloud-based SaaS app. Replacing is a good option when the existing app is not meeting business specifications and investing in it is not worth the money. This is the most quick and easy app modernization strategy to follow.
FGI is a New York-based financial services company that delivers diverse products to clients across more than 60 countries. FGI’s extensive offerings include services such as asset-based lending, invoice discounting, credit insurance, foreign exchange, and receivable financing. They also provide financial services such as collections, risk protection, and mitigation strategies.
The FGI application was written in PHP, implementing a monolithic architecture. Apache was the web server, while MySQL was used as the open-source RDBMS. FGI implemented an on-premises environment, hosting the components in cPanel.
ClickIT implemented the ‘Re-architect’ app modernization strategy for the FGI application. The company designed a resilient architecture on the AWS cloud, converted the monolithic app into a microservices architecture, and migrated the new cloud solution to the AWS cloud environment.
Additionally, the company decomposed the app into smaller individual services that communicated via APIs. With GitLab CI, a CI/CD auto-deployment was implemented for production and staging. A Github Strategy complemented development environments for deployments such as branching and PR request management.
The comprehensive AWS cloud portfolio enabled the company to leverage several cloud services such as EC2, ECS, ECR, IAM, S3, Guarduty, Cloudtrail, Session Manager, RDS, and VPC. They used Docker for containerization tasks, and Apache ran in a Docker container as well.
Moreover, ClickIT implemented Docker-Compose for local development. All infrastructure was deployed using Terraform, including IAM users, policies, groups, and roles. With AWS best practices in place, they were able to highly prioritize security.
With application modernization, FGI implemented a whole new cloud-based solution that was highly scalable, secure and delivered better performance.
Take a look at the complete FGI case study!
Here are the important elements to consider while modernizing your application:
While your on-premise infrastructure runs multiple apps and services, not all software has equal modernization needs. As such, identify the services that you should migrate to the cloud on a priority.
It’s been a while since the cloud has turned into a necessity from being an option for businesses of all sizes. The cloud offers ready-to-use managed services powered by world-class solutions and is always up to date. This brings faster time to market without much upfront investment.
Apps get global distribution and high availability with automatic scaling and resilience with optimized resource usage and costs. However, it’s important to choose the right cloud migration strategy to leverage the cloud revolution. To run apps on virtual data centers, you can choose the IaaS cloud model. On the other hand, you can opt for a PaaS model to build and manage apps in the cloud. Without a proper migration strategy, monitoring, and analysis, you can end up paying thousands of extra dollars.
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the top three cloud service providers to consider for your legacy application modernization needs.
While migrating to the cloud is the first step towards legacy application modernization, choosing the right architecture for the app in the cloud is key to fully leveraging modern technology benefits.
Businesses that don’t have the required expertise in cloud technologies can start with containerization. It is a process of encapsulating an application along with its libraries, binaries, configuration files, and other dependencies into a container. As such, it runs in an isolated environment and delivers the same performance across different environments without version conflicts.
Achieving this objective with physical servers can be expensive and resource-intensive. With containerization, the legacy app becomes scalable, portable, and secure. Using container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, you can easily scale, deploy, and manage containers in the cloud with ease. However, this approach doesn’t fully leverage the cloud benefits.
To migrate a legacy app to the cloud:
Legacy apps are built using a monolithic architecture wherein the entire software is written as a single code with closely coupled components. As such, updating or scaling a function requires changes to the entire app.
By breaking each function into a single service, developers can easily deploy, update, or manage services. Microservices architecture is an approach to breaking a single large code into smaller loosely coupled components. Said components are independent, modular, and communicate with each other via REST APIs. As a result, teams can quickly add new features to gain faster time to market. This is the most desirable application modernization approach in the cloud environment.
Serverless architecture enables organizations to deploy and manage applications without managing the underlying infrastructure that is automatically provisioned on-demand by the cloud service provider. It means you just pay for the resources consumed during the time of execution of a function.
Subsequently, modern technologies augment legacy apps to reduce costs, increase scalability, and faster time to market. With image-based management and orchestration of containers, maintenance becomes easy. AWS offers Elastic Container Service (AWS ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that is free. AWS Fargate is another serverless computing engine that serves this purpose but comes with a cost.
To effectively automate deploying, scaling, and managing container apps, businesses should select the right container orchestration management system that suits their business needs.
Here are the top 3 options available for this purpose:
Kubernetes is a popular open-source container orchestration platform developed by Google in Golang and is now a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It uses a declarative configuration method wherein developers can declare the desired state of containers using YAML files.
It comes with useful features such as automated scheduling, automatic rollbacks and rollouts, and self-healing capabilities. Other features are hybrid/multi-cloud support, horizontal scalability, extensibility, and community support, to name a few.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service is a fully managed Kubernetes service offered by AWS that relieves businesses from the complex tasks of installing and managing Kubernetes nodes and control planes on AWS.
It easily integrates with other AWS services, making it easy for AWS-heavy workloads to gain high scalability and security. It is compatible with the standard Kubernetes environment, which means you can migrate Kubernetes workloads to AWS EKS without modifying any code.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is a fully managed Docker-based container application management solution from AWS. It comes with two launch types.
Not sure which one to choose, Amazon ECS or EKS? Read the blog!
CI/CD is a part of the DevOps framework. CI stands for continuous integration, and CD stands for continuous delivery (or continuous deployment). A CI tool enables organizations to automate the software build process comprising continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery. With quick and frequent delivery of code changes, CI/CD tools shorten software development cycles and bring faster time to market to the table.
In the DevOps approach, a pipeline is a deployable code unit path comprising multiple steps such as build, test, deploy, and monitoring. The CI pipeline is the first part of the delivery pipeline that handles the automation of code build and testing phases. This pipeline is triggered when code is committed to a code repository such as Git.
The build phase takes over and compiles the code, which is then tested for errors and prepares a deployable code unit. There are other tasks included, like running security checks, sending Slack notifications, etc.
Continuous delivery is the extension of a continuous integration pipeline that involves automation of pushing the code into production and continuous monitoring of the performance of the application and infrastructure. All this without the need for human intervention. With a rightly designed pipeline, the app behaves consistently in the test and production environment.
While continuous delivery and continuous deployment are both abbreviated as CD, their practices differ primarily in the manual approval step. In a continuous delivery model, after passing CI, the changes are automatically deployed to a staging or production environment. However, there might be a final manual approval before production deployment. In the case of continuous deployment, there is no human intervention.
While choosing a CI/CD tool, check out the features like hosting options, interface, support for Docker, plugins, issue tracking and extensibility, horizontal scalability, configuration complexity, security, etc.
Jenkins, GitLab, AWS Deploy, TeamCity, and Bamboo are a few popular CI/CD tools.
Infrastructure as Code tools automate the process of building and managing the IT infrastructure using code. They minimize human intervention in infrastructure management tasks such as configuring networks, servers, databases, and 3rd party integrations, delivering agility, scalability, and resilience.
While choosing an IaC tool for your app modernization strategy, check out for features like Infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, scripting abilities, and container orchestration.
Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Pulumi are three popular IaC tools.
Automation, scaling resources, and data manipulation are the most common tasks in a cloud-native DevOps environment. While there are automation tools to help you in this regard, scripting is also important for ad-hoc tasks such as AMI configuration, AWS user data management, repetitive development tasks, etc. Therefore, you should choose a scripting or programming language for your cloud application.
Read the blog DevOps Architecture to enhance your workflow.
Once the application is migrated to the cloud environment, the next step is to effectively manage the application and infrastructure. Right from integrations with backend services and 3rd party solutions to monitoring the performance metrics, security, and ensuring a rich end-user experience, businesses should ensure that the app delivers optimal performance by fully leveraging cloud benefits.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) or Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools enable you to visualize app performance and cloud infrastructure health in real time. It also gives you insights into key aspects such as app resource consumption, app dependencies, performance comparison of pre-migration and post-migration, full-stack observability, app latency, and scalability gains..
They automatically detect and fix anomalies, analyze root cause diagnostics, and reduce MTTR. For instance, if a function takes more time to execute, you’ll receive an alert and modify the code to expedite that process.
New Relic, Sumo Logic, AppDynamics, Datadog, and Dynatrace are a few popular APM tools in the market.
Application modernization is all about transforming legacy apps hosted on on-premise environments into cloud-native services powered by microservices architecture.
Today, cloud technology is not an option anymore but has become a necessity for businesses of all sizes. This includes Software development. While the cloud benefits of elastic resources, world-class solutions, and flexible subscription models look enticing, the need for modernization has already outweighed these benefits.
By planning, assessing, and executing an effective application modernization strategy, you can ensure that your business stays competitive in the ever-changing digital landscape. Whether you’re a startup, a small business, or a large corporation, application modernization is essential for long-term success and sustainability.
While the application modernization strategy depends on your existing infrastructure and your business objectives, re-architecture is the best approach as it allows the app to fully leverage the cloud advantages.
A cloud-native architecture is a software development environment that combines all components developers use to build cloud-native applications.
-Microservices Architecture
-Containers
-Application Programming Interface (API)
-Service Mesh
-Immutable Infrastructure
Yes, tools such as AWS Migrate and Azure Migrate help you automate the application modernization process. But, you should have an application modernization strategy to leverage these tools effectively.
Rehost, Refactor, Rearchitect, Rebuild, and Replace.
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