Modernizing your Applications with Azure
What is Modernization?
Gartner defines it as the migration of legacy to new applications or platforms, including the integration of new functionality to provide the latest functions to the business. We can say legacy applications were built with a monolithic architecture, that is designing and developing a complete application as a single unit. For example, the software’s database, the front-end, and the server-side application on a server. Legacy applications have their advantages. However, for an organization considering high availability, and looking to scale their applications and services easily, modernization may be your best bet.
Why Modernization?
- Introduce Agility to Legacy applications by migrating them to modern platforms or breaking them into smaller components which is easy to manage.
- It enhances the Security components of your application and services.
- It increases productivity among employees
- Scalability: The ability to meet increased demands of your application and services easily.
Modernization Strategies
For Modernization to be successful, choosing the right strategy is important. Your modernization strategy should work towards supporting a framework of organizational goals.
Azure has 5 pillars that point out possible organizational goals
Types of Modernization strategies as defined by Microsoft:
- Rehost: Sometimes called “lift-and-shift,” Organizations take apps from their previous environment and transition them as-is to their current environment. This is an easy and faster approach as no code change is required.
- Refactor: Refactoring prioritizes productivity as well as speed. With this strategy, apps need only minimal code changes so that they can connect easily to and make the most of a cloud-first environment.
- Rearchitect. If an organization needs cloud scalability, rearchitecting might be the right approach. With rearchitecting, apps functionality and code get modified and extended to scale better in the cloud.
- Rebuild (or rewrite). For recreating an app using cloud solutions, rebuilding is sometimes the right option. It’s a heavier lift, but it may be essential if existing apps have limited functionality or lifespan.
- Replace. If an app won’t meet current or future business needs even after rebuilding, replacing it with a ready-made solution may be necessary. This approach can be faster than rebuilding and free up valuable development resources.
You can choose a modernization strategy after carefully considering your organizational goals.
Modernization requires careful planning, assessment of your current application and resources and creating a holistic plan to ensure that the process is easy.
Benefits of using Azure for modernizing your application.
Recently, I saw a movie where everything in the house can be controlled by hand gestures, this reduced the manual process involved in moving about the house or accessing shelves e.t.c.
Azure is like that house, where all the tools and services needed to make your modernization journey easy have been provided. The Azure Platform has fully managed services to help companies accelerate application development, improve customer and employee experiences, and increase application security and reliability. Services such as the Azure App Services, Azure Kubernetes services, Azure Web Application Firewall, Azure Machine Learning and so many others are available to make your journey to modernization easy.
