5 Best Practices for Application Modernization
Tags: beginners, cicd, architecture, devops
Published: 2023-01-09 15:32:12

According to Google Cloud's 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps study, modernizing legacy systems to adopt a loosely-coupled microservices design is the biggest predictor of success for continuous delivery. DevOps developers, according to studies, benefit from more frequent code deployments, shorter lead times for deployment, low change failure rates, and shorter time to recovery.

For instance, adopting a microservices design reduces fine-grained dependencies between services, making it easy to test, deploy and scale separately. Further, organizations can modernize it with automated analysis and deep observability when combined with DevOps best practices.

However, until now, [legacy application modernization](https://www.simform.com/blog/legacy-system-modernization/) has been a labor-intensive, multi-year process with a high failure rate. How can a firm enhance and accelerate modernization activities with contemporary tools, well-known DevOps best practices, and targeted business benefits? Or, to put it another way, how do we modernize modernization?

Architects may control technical debt before it becomes unsustainable by using automation, AI, and data science, creating repeatable pipelines, and shifting architecture to the left. We'll delve deeper into these methods in this article.

###Automate Everything

Automate manual tasks with DevOps approaches to produce scalable, repeatable operations. In light of the success of DevOps over the past ten years, adding intelligent automation, AI, and data science to modernization—as well as developing a repeatable pipeline for refactoring—is a logical next step.

###CI/CD Approach

A fundamental best practice for DevOps teams, CI/CD approaches are already well-known patterns developed firms use for their application life cycles. But without ongoing upgrading, there can be no continual delivery. Elite teams continually track the building of technical debt and deal with it at each application release cycle, embedding continuous modernization into the life cycles of their applications.

###Adopt Observability

For cloud-native architectures, observability, which is characterized as monitoring, logging, and tracing, serves as the foundation. Deep observability, which goes beyond simple static code analysis to include more in-depth domain-driven behavior analysis and dynamically tracking dependency interactions, is necessary for modernizing an existing monolith. This is also how you find out if a piece of code is dead and no longer in use.

###Ensure Architectural Parity

To inform your application architecture and its modernization alternatives, you must comprehend your infrastructure architecture. Lift-and-shift poses problems for many businesses because cloud-native apps have a topology that is fundamentally different from typical three-tier monolithic application architectures.

It's crucial to make sure your modernization strategy provides architectural parity between the target application and its ultimate destination in the cloud, whether it's a hybrid solution (part on-premises, part cloud), public, or private cloud. Additionally, it's critical to comprehend your modernizing options: Re-platform, refactor, rewrite, re-host, re-architect, etc. Identify the elements that require immediate attention. 

Automated service extraction, data science-driven analysis, and, most importantly, humans will help you get the most out of the solution.  

###Get Execution Support

It's not just about clearing out your backlog; your executive sponsors for a project of this kind need to comprehend, in terms of business, why this is important for the company. Numerous metrics illustrate the financial and lost potential costs of sustaining mission-critical applications that are troublesome and aging.

You must create a business case that details the costs of maintaining legacy apps in terms of both time and resources needed to maintain them as well as the detrimental effects on innovation, customer acquisition and retention, and speed to market in order to gain executive support for your modernization initiatives.

##Parting Words

DevOps principles were developed to enhance the dependable and effective delivery of software from development through operations and out to customers by IT firms. Teams will be able to deliver application transformation projects more quickly if they apply this cutting-edge automation, pipeline, and deep observability technologies to application modernization activities. Organizations may advance people and projects into the next generation of cloud apps more reliably and effectively by investing in training application teams in these techniques and providing contemporary tooling to enable that training.