How Your Organization Can Benefit from Application Modernization with Amazon Web Services?

There's growing pressure on today's organizations to modernize their business applications to boost agility, expedite time-to-market, reduce expenses, and accelerate innovation. Cloud computing supports and enables all these goals. That's why it has become essential for firms in every industry to transition from legacy infrastructure to a modern, cloud-native environment.

AWS is considered the gold standard for public clouds, which explains why it is the #1 public cloud service provider with a market share of over 51% (2021). With its vast portfolio of services and solutions, AWS has enabled thousands of organizations to launch services 20X faster, decrease speed-to-market from months to hours, lower their total cost of ownership (TCO), and reduce app development costs by 60% or more.

Your company can also enjoy all these benefits of application modernization with AWS. Let's explore.

Key Characteristics of Modern Applications

Modern enterprise applications are built using agile software development and delivery processes, modular architectural patterns, and serverless operational models. These new globally-available applications are architected to address evolving business requirements and the growing enterprise demand for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

They easily scale up or down to accommodate thousands or millions of users, respond in milliseconds, and can manage huge amounts of data to the scale of terabytes and even petabytes. With modern applications, organizations can:

• Reduce risk
• Accelerate time to market
• Decrease TCO
• Innovate faster

All of these are solid reasons for your organization to modernize applications with cloud computing. And for this, there's no better choice than Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Application Modernization with AWS

Your application modernization effort with AWS requires a multi-dimensional approach. This approach includes a contemporary infrastructure that:

• Provides a secure and flexible operations framework
• Ensures process quality, availability, and agility

AWS cloud infrastructure brings all these capabilities for your modernization project. Modern, cloud-ready applications also need fast, hyperscale, cloud-native databases that enable teams to store vast quantities of data and access it with millisecond latency. The cloud-based databases from AWS are ideal for these requirements.

One such database, Amazon Aurora, provides advanced flexibility and technical freedom so teams can easily eliminate commercial database dependencies while maintaining the performance and functionality of their applications. Another AWS database, Amazon DynamoDB offers single-digit millisecond performance and near-unlimited throughput for many kinds of high-performance applications.

Like Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, AWS offers numerous cloud-based databases and 15+ purpose-built engines. These databases can process millions of requests per second and scale globally. Plus, they will help you build scalable, distributed applications for all kinds of needs and use cases.

In addition, AWS offers hundreds of tools for your unique workloads. Use these tools to build new applications and retire legacy solutions. Leverage automation to gain agility, achieve incremental savings, and significant cost optimization.

The AWS platform allows integration with legacy applications and cloud-native solutions so you can run all your existing systems and applications in the cloud and get the best return from all your assets. Equally important, you can free your team to focus on innovation instead of wasting time on undifferentiated work and boring tasks like managing servers.

Benefits of Application Modernization with AWS

When modernizing your applications with AWS, you can replatform, refactor, or replace these workloads with managed open-source frameworks, container services, and serverless technologies. You can adopt purpose-built data stores, software automation, and a DevOps model gain the maximum agility and TCO benefits.

In addition, the AWS ecosystem will help you:

• Accelerate development
• Improve security, scalability, and reliability
• Share ops tasks earlier and enhance them with AI/ML
• Improve app performance to delight customers

AWS will enable you to speed up build and release cycles as you build modern applications. You can automate test and release processes to reduce error rates and ensure that applications are more reliable at deployment. You can also offload infrastructure management and operational overhead to AWS to reduce maintenance costs and enhance user experiences.

The AWS cloud supports a modular architecture so your teams can quickly make changes to individual application components. In this way, they can lower the risk to the whole application and confidently experiment with new ideas more often. AWS offers a pay-for-value pricing model for modern applications, reducing the costs of over-provisioning and ensuring that you never have to pay for idle resources.

A Phased Approach to Application Modernization with AWS

AWS approaches application modernization in a phased manner. The modernization roadmap is divided into three discrete phases:

1. Assess
2. Mobilize
3. Migrate and Modernize

In the assess phase, you will analyze your existing application portfolio and use AWS application modernization questionnaires to identify the systems that need to be modernized. You will also determine the strategic value of all the applications in the portfolio and execute a technical modernization solution. At the end of this phase, you will have an application modernization blueprint and a technical and functional architecture for the target state of one or two applications.

In phase two, you will build the implementation roadmap to create a modern, agile application architecture. You will also identify the milestones to convert applications source code and data, map all operational areas, and implement an infrastructure solution using cloud-native approaches and best-of-breed languages and frameworks. Once this phase is complete, you will have a target state data model design, a refined operating model, and key business case metrics.

The final phase is about embracing a DevOps culture in cloud-native operations as part of building a site reliability engineering (SRE) capability. You will also implement processes for change management, program management, quality assurance, and service excellence to ensure successful modernization adoption.

Best Practices for Application Modernization with AWS

To begin the app modernization effort on AWS, first establish your aims and objectives. In many cases, this may be achieved by employing an engineer coach who will work alongside your team to educate them on cloud-native infrastructure and modern best practices.

AWS can help you establish a cloud-native workflow and overcome the challenges of legacy infrastructure. So, make sure to research and use the proper tools, procedures, and processes to decrease the risk of ineffective workflows and failed modernization.

Refactoring is a good way to break up monolithic applications since it necessitates the use of cloud-native technology. It will help you cut expenses, increase ROI, and decrease the risk of application downtime. With AWS, you also have the flexibility to lift-and-shift applications or fully re-platform them, so make sure to choose the option depending on your unique modernization needs.

Some other good practices to optimize your app modernization effort:

• Select one or two applications for the initial modernization
• Maintain, extend, deploy, and manage these applications to meet your future needs
• Determine the required supporting infrastructure, application middleware, and middleware services before scaling modernization

Get Started with Application Modernization with AWS and Axcess

As we have seen, application modernization can bring numerous benefits to your organization. However, the effort also involves many moving parts which can be overwhelming for an inexperienced team. Axcess is here to reduce the overwhelm and help you modernize your enterprise apps with minimal hiccups. Contact us to get started on your app modernization journey.