As businesses started progressing towards digital transformation, legacy apps and the underlying infrastructure likely began hindering the pace of innovation. Read on to discover the benefits of app modernization and learn how cloud-native app modernization aids in digital transformation, enabling faster innovation.
Customers today are expecting easy-to-use applications. They want better access to information and an excellent user experience. Your apps' performance must scale with these rapidly changing demands to stay relevant and keep your revenue growing.
Today, most tech companies are moving away from their legacy technologies to overcome this barrier, by planning for the future through the app modernization process.
What is Application Modernization?
Application modernization is the process of modernizing your existing on-premise apps to meet current business needs. It primarily involves updating legacy apps to flexible cloud environments using modern technology stacks.
However, modernizing applications isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. The app modernization process depends entirely on the level of upgrade and optimization required to meet business goals and expected ROI.
For many businesses, the process may involve simply re-hosting (lift-and-shift) on-premise apps to the cloud. For others, it can comprise refactoring monolithic apps into microservices. Some organizations may prefer to re-architect their apps completely, ensuring the app utilizes the full potential of the cloud.
Modernizing Apps with Cloud-Native Approach
While it's possible to lift-and-shift apps without heavy re-coding, the real value of modernization comes from building your app from scratch for 'cloud-native' environments.
A cloud-native app is an application built using modern cloud technologies. Each service packaged as lightweight containers, deployed as microservices, and managed on flexible infrastructure using agile DevOps processes.
With cloud-native development, teams can build and maintain loosely coupled microservices independently. They can roll out new updates and features to an app quickly and automatically without disrupting the end users' experience.
The Benefits of Cloud-Native Applications
Faster Time-to-Market
Cloud-native tools and DevOps processes help in accelerating the overall development time. The ability to independently deploy microservices means teams can push new updates and features incrementally and automatically to the app. This independence has a direct impact on the development time, that can cut down the time-to-market from weeks to hours.
Autoscaling
Cloud-native apps use autoscaling to create instances for the microservices that need to handle the demand. Meaning the app would dynamically scale resources up or down and adjust to the varying load. Autoscaling also supports a better user experience. With autoscaling, end users would not face performance lag or service loss.
Automation
The cloud-native development approach facilitates cloud automation through orchestration engines such as Kubernetes. This allows you to automate testing, deployments, security, scaling, managing microservices, and even cloud infrastructure management. As a result, you'd be able to release the app faster while having better control over IT resources.
Resiliency
Cloud-native apps are also resilient to failures by leveraging disaster recovery and automated failover features in the cloud. If there's any trouble, the app would handle the outage automatically and the processing would shift to another data center immediately.
Lower Costs
Multiple reasons make cloud-native apps cost-efficient. For example, containerization, makes it easy to manage and secure apps independently of the underlying infrastructure. Numerous cloud-native tools allow uniformity of tooling and infrastructure, leading to lower prices. The open-source model of the cloud-native architecture means you'll find multiple vendors who offer support for the same technology, preventing you from getting locked into one vendor or high prices.
On top of that, the serverless computing capability offers a pay-per-use model, enabling you to run dynamic workloads with flexible pricing. Serverless computing also has indirect cost savings resulting from resiliency and reduced downtime through automated redundancy, loosely-coupled services, fault-tolerance, and auto-recovery mechanisms of the cloud-native architecture.
Modernize Your App with delaPlex
At delaPlex, we've tackled several challenging digital transformation journeys for our partner clients by helping them realize the benefits of cloud-native features to meet their business needs.
Whether it is about re-hosting on-premise apps, building independent microservices, or developing cloud-native apps, the experts at delaPlex have extensive industry domain experience and a strong cloud partner ecosystem that you can leverage to modernize business applications.
Bring your apps to market faster, accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, and drive business growth with access to a comprehensive technology toolbox and a world-class team of software engineers.
Want to learn more about how delaPlex can help you? Contact us today to start the conversation.
