Application Modernization Agility on Google Cloud

Published in

Google Cloud - Community

4 min readSep 20, 2023

Application Modernization

Application modernization is the process of refactoring an organization’s legacy apps to a cloud-native approach. It is process of taking existing organization on-premises apps to modernize may involve migrating those apps to a various cloud type i.e., private, public, hybrid in other words migrating from Monolithic to Microservices architecture.

Pillars of application modernization

Architecture and Cloud Native Technology

DevOps Culture and Automation

Digital Transformation

Well defined process

Why modernize legacy apps?

Legacy applications are also often monolithic applications. Monolithic applications are difficult to update, and they are difficult and expensive to scale. Modernizing legacy applications help businesses update and optimize outdated technology systems to achieve effective business agility operational efficiency and scalable solutions.

Monolithic apps are difficult to update due to shared and rigid scaling. Because all of an application’s components having shared pipelines together, it is difficult and costly to add latest’s features which leads to complexity and other challenges.

By modernizing an application to a microservices (rearchitecting, rebuilding or replacing) in which each component is smaller, loosely coupled, and can be deployed and scaled independently of one another efficiently.

Benefits of application modernization

Business agility

Enhanced security and reliability

Scalability

Operational costs and customer satisfaction

efficient deployment of resources.

streamline infrastructure.

App modernization Phases

Assess and Planning

Architecting and modernize applications.

Operations and Maintenance

GCP offered services for Apps modernization

Cloud App Modernization Program (CAMP)

CAMP has been designed as an end-to-end framework to help guide organizations through their modernization journey by assessing where they are today and identifying their most effective path forward.

App Mod efforts fall into three common categories and CAMP provides customers with best practices and tooling for each in addition to assessments that guide them on where to start.

Hybrid and multicloud application platform

Build, deploy, and optimize applications anywhere, simply, flexibly, and securely, with Google Cloud’s consistent development and operations experience for hybrid and multicloud environments.

Cloud-native application development

Leverage Google Cloud’s end-to-end platform to accelerate your developer productivity, simplify operations, and build security and compliance into your software delivery process.

Application development and delivery with serverless

Develop, deploy, and scale applications fast and securely in a fully managed serverless environment. Google Cloud’s serverless compute platform abstracts away all infrastructure management by automatically scaling up and down from zero almost instantaneously, depending on traffic.

Application migration

Migrate traditional apps away from virtual machines and into native containers. Our unique automated approach extracts critical application elements from the VM so you can easily insert those elements into containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Anthos clusters without the VM layers (like Guest OS) that become unnecessary with containers.

API management

Accelerate application design and development with an API-first approach. Leverage Google Cloud’s API management platform to govern, analyze, and get visibility into all your APIs across hybrid and multi cloud environment.

Challenges: -

Outdated and legacy systems

Knowledge deficit

Budget Allocation

Data silos and Migration

Application Modernization Best Practices

Adopt and re-architect for microservices distributed applications.

Prioritize applications to modernize first.

look for better data migrations solutions as per legacy or Monolithic applications.