Modernizing legacy applications is a competitive strategy to leverage the latest and emerging technologies and drive constant innovation. Modern and updated software and applications help businesses create custom-centric content, products, and services faster and better. The software modernization process is complex and requires technical excellence, still, there are great resources that contribute to its simplification.
Benefits of Application Modernization
Application modernization unlocks multiple benefits from improving overall productivity to increased agility for businesses. Briefly elaborated below are several advantages of shifting toward modern applications or updating the tech stack.
Modernized applications perform better in every domain, making products and services more interesting, advanced, and innovative. This comes as a market advantage when businesses can create services that are customer-centric and win their loyalty. Also, businesses can save finances spent on obsolete technologies used in legacy systems. In a nutshell, application modernization solutions accelerate business growth and help them stay resilient with advancing technology.
Improved Scalability
With modern applications and updated architecture, businesses can assess their needs and manage workloads to suit their needs.
Cost Optimization
Improved resource utilization, enhanced automation, accelerated workflow, and continuous technology integration help businesses cut down expenses and manage their operational costs.
Increased Flexibility
Application modernization solutions use modular and flexible architectures that enable them to change to the changing technology trends and business requirements.
Enhanced User Experience
Modern applications are better at producing more interactive user interfaces, enhancing user engagement and overall customer experience.
Security Enhancements
Modernized applications are compliant with modern and latest security standards, reducing vulnerability.
Support for Emerging Technologies
Businesses using cloud modernization services have more affinity to adopt the latest technologies and promote an innovation-driven culture.
Top Tools and Resources for Application Modernization
Software application modernization is an intricate process, requiring an excellent understanding of applications resources, and tools to achieve the modernization goals.
Documentation by Cloud Service Providers
Top-rated cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provide informative and extensive documentation on application modernization. This documentation contains detailed information, tutorials, and best practices and acts as a valuable resource for information and the right process flow.
Questions businesses may find answers to on these platforms are:
- How to use AWS ECS or Kubernetes services?
- How to use serverless computing?
- How to leverage a database?
Containerization and Orchestration Platforms
These platforms help enterprises containerize their applications and orchestrate to manage complex workflow. Docker and Kubernetes collectively can provide essential and comprehensive help guides on application containerization, container scaling, and management of microservices.
Developers can use Docker to create Dockerfiles and share them with development code to allow others to rebuild and run the composed application in a consistent environment. Kubernetes, an open-source platform for orchestration, helps businesses build resilient infrastructure by managing application containers.
Answers businesses may find with containerization and orchestration platforms are:
- How to containerize applications?
- How to coordinate various tasks to sustain complex workflows?
- How to manage application containers?
CI/CD Tools
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment tools are associated with creating a pipeline for modernization and determining the flow. Jenkins, GitHub, and GitLab are highly rated and popular for creating actions on building, testing, and deploying processes. CI/CD tools are significant for automating processes and maintaining continuous integration and deployment in the cloud.
Microservices Architecture
This architectural style helps divide an application into small and independent sets of services. Each set stands for a different and specific business service tendency. These small services have their individual data storage and use APIs to communicate with each other. With each service executing independent autonomy, microservices promote flexible and scalable application development.
IBM's Modernization Field Guide
IBM's application modernization guide is a comprehensive resource encompassing strategies for containerization, refactoring, and rehosting. Developers can utilize the intensive information on legacy software modernization and hybrid cloud environments and strategize the process.
With this guide, businesses can learn how to effectively build innovative solutions and expedite digital transformation to reduce costs and minimize business disruptions. A highly valuable and informative guide to drive more intelligent capabilities and implement them in a hybrid cloud environment.
Conclusion
Application modernization allows enterprises and organizations of all sizes to leverage emerging technologies and gain competitive advantages from tech-driven innovation. Working with obsolete technologies limits business processes.
Lack of automation decreases overall productivity and increases the technical gap for businesses. Modernizing applications is a cultural shift and evolving while steering through the technical landscape. Regularly updating for the latest technologies and utilizing community and open-source resources and tools are effective strategies for understanding and implementing the best practices of software modernization.
