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Introduction
Legacy applications and infrastructure are becoming unsustainable and non-cost-effective in the cloud-native world. A significant chunk of IT Operations for cost is used to run the enterprise applications to support crucial business needs.
Why Infrastructure Modernization?
This makes more sense for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure to achieve benefits such as less time to market, ease of maintenance, reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
Along with that, Cloud and DevOps innovations continue to provide infrastructure more dynamically and in a distributed manner. Organizations have the below options to move.
- Continue expanding and maintaining Legacy infrastructure , which may be too rigid and siloed and becomes irrelevant in the current digital change.
- Complete Lift and Shift to Cloud, which may introduce additional complexity, less control over applications, and more cost.
- Modernize the infrastructure to match performance, reliability, scalability and to be more cost-effective.
Continuing using The Legacy application and Complete lift and shift of applications might be suitable for some cases, but modernizing the application and infrastructure empowers Teams to scale fast, with more reliability and cost-effectiveness.
Six Key Aspects of Infrastructure Modernization
Once the organization has decided to move ahead with the modernization of infra and application. Below are the critical aspects of the strategy that must be incorporated
- Break Monolithic Architecture
- Make Your Applications and Infrastructure Independent of each other
- Cost-optimized Application and Infrastructure Modernization
- Migration to the Cloud
- Inbuilt Security
- Integration of DevOps
Break Monolithic architecture
Break down the monolithic architecture into microservices. To do so, you need to know what’s inside it. To start, divide the whole microservices into different components, including all web servers, APIs, Storage, and networking. Based on microservices, refactor them to a domain-driven design. Access the broken components, and map them with future services. If a single infrastructure component contains more than 10 % of the application stack, break it further into components. While breaking down a monolithic architecture into microservices, analysing the migration’s dependency and priorities is essential.
Once you have the baseline components ready and divided into services, it’s time to convert them to Microservices. Microservices are small applications, each running its process and communicating with a lightweight mechanism. These services are built around business capabilities and are often single-purpose code that owns one functionality. These services are independently deployable as they are all small virtualized applications that can be deployed using containers. This will also help in getting started on the journey of becoming cloud-native.
Make Your Applications and Infrastructure Independent of each other
As part of the application and infrastructure modernization, these services should be separated from any dependency on the existing environment they run on. Creating microservices that do not depend on the infrastructure it needs to run gives us complete flexibility to deploy the services on any infrastructure without being vendor Locked-in. Focus on adopting cloud-native technologies to support your applications. Make your modernization journey completely container-oriented. It will ultimately help you get aligned with the hybrid cloud adoption process.
Cost-optimized Application and Infrastructure Modernization
For a successful infrastructure modernization, organizations must review and prioritize the applications’ platform requirements to define the best-suited deployment environment for the application, based on cloud, Containers, Kubernetes, and Serverless. Breaking big applications into small independent units, organizations can quickly deploy and create environments for development, testing, and Operations using Automation and Infra As a Code framework. These result in a faster development cycle and optimized cost.
Also, choosing the right cloud for scalability, reliability, and application deployment models helps us optimize the cost of running the applications and maintaining the infrastructure.
Migration to the Cloud
The success of modernization largely depends upon the adoption of the cloud. Organizations can expand and grow their business painlessly by leveraging the cloud capabilities to have a tangible increase in performance and customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Migration to the cloud becomes vital for companies looking to achieve digital transformation and leverage growth opportunities by modernising their infrastructure. Just focus on the business requirements and objectives and develop a strategy to start the cloud’s migration journey for modernizing your enterprise’s infrastructure.
Know about 6 Strategies for successful Cloud Migration
Inbuilt Security
Security is often overlooked as a post-deployment activity, which causes friction between DevOps and Security Team and often slows down the development cycle. Security should be baked into the development activity right from the application development to overcome this. The organization needs to adopt DevSecOps to achieve this.
DevSecOps is a cultural shift in the IT industry to bake security into the rapid development cycle, including development and deployment, integrating it in DevOps. Additionally, when infrastructure automation is achieved through Infrastructure as Code for modernizing your legacy infrastructure, security becomes a significant concern.
Infrastructure as Code Security has been accepted as one of the most important concerns in the DevSecOps environment. To overcome this, best security practices and compliance requirements are built into the IaC template files that cover different aspects of information security such as data encryption, network segmentation, access control requirements, log collection and retention, and several others. Infrastructure as Code Security is a crucial pillar that aligns DevOps, Security, and Compliance for Infrastructure Management processes.
Integration of DevOps
DevOps focuses on speed and how faster an application can reach the market. DevOps bridges the gap to have any manual intervention in Deployments by adding automation in the release and delivery cycle.
Application deployment and infrastructure provisioning should be on-demand, which means applications can be deployed at any time using infrastructure provisioning and configuration tools and tight integration of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Integrating DevOps in your modernization process allows faster deployment and helps to fail less and recover faster.
Adopting DevOps within the day-to-day practices will make it easier to create and manage the operations environment. It brings in more rather than just simple infrastructure automation. DevOps integration will help ensure that things are error-free, able to roll back in case of failures, and can rebuild themselves on multiple servers.
Conclusion
No doubt modernizing the legacy applications and infrastructure proves beneficial when it comes to achieving the enterprises’ business objectives. The demand for faster time to market is increasing in this digital era, which ultimately implies improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.
Such digital transformations solely depend on the speed and simplicity of the application delivery and the infrastructure’s ability to accelerate the developers’ productivity. These requirements are greatly fulfilled by the adoption of cloud-native technologies and cloud environments. Thus, modernizing your legacy applications and infrastructure by considering the solutions mentioned above becomes inevitable when your enterprise calls for a successful digital transformation that can be profitable for their business processes.
What's Next?
- Talk to our Application Modernization Expert
- Learn how to get started with Application Modernization?
