Application Modernization: A Step-by-Step Guide

Many businesses struggle with managing and extending the life of their legacy applications and aging mobile apps. In most cases, the ideal solution is to modernize business-critical applications, a process that enables them to utilize modern technologies, making them easier to support and better able to scale as your business grows. Modernizing these applications will also improve performance and reduce maintenance time and cost. However, modernizing legacy applications is a complex process that involves careful assessment, planning, and execution.

In this blog post, we break down the application modernization process into a proven, step-by-step methodology, which includes strategy development and a systematic approach to revitalizing your legacy apps. 

Specifically, we will cover:

• What is  application modernization?
• Why is it important to modernize your legacy application stacks?
• How to create an application modernization strategy.
• The five steps to modernizing your business-critical applications.

What Is Application Modernization?

Application modernization is the process of transforming aging legacy applications — which are difficult to scale, maintain, and update — into modern, often cloud-native, applications that deliver the benefits of elasticity, availability, security, and rapid innovation.

A word about application modernization and cloud platforms: While many of the modernization strategies discussed in this blog post can be implemented in either on-premises data centers or on-cloud platforms, the most advantageous environment for modernization is almost always public cloud platforms. We will identify the advantages of the cloud as warranted throughout.

Benefits of Application Modernization

Modernizing your business-critical applications accelerates innovation, reduces your time to market, and provides new-and-improved customer experiences. Modernizing can bring many benefits to your business, including:

• Enhanced Efficiency: Modernizing applications often involves streamlining processes, improving user interfaces, and optimizing performance, leading to increased operational efficiency/ies.

• Cost Reduction: Outdated applications typically require more maintenance and support and may increase your infrastructure costs. By modernizing, companies have an opportunity to reduce these costs through automation, cloud adoption, and optimized resource utilization.

• Scalability: Modern applications are typically designed to be more scalable, enabling businesses to easily adapt to changes in demand, user base, and market conditions.

• Improved Customer Experience: Upgrading applications can lead to better user experiences through intuitive interfaces, faster response times, and personalized features, which can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Integration and Interoperability: Legacy applications often operate in silos, making data sharing and integration challenging. Modernized applications are designed with interoperability in mind, allowing for seamless integration with other systems, databases, and third-party services.

• Security: Older applications may have vulnerabilities that expose businesses to cybersecurity risks. Modernizing applications can strengthen security, incorporate the latest encryption methods, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

• Competitive Advantage: Companies that embrace modern technologies can gain a competitive edge by being more agile, innovative, and responsive to market changes compared to those relying on outdated systems.

• Data Insights and Analytics: Modern applications are often built with analytics and data-driven decision-making capabilities, enabling businesses to extract valuable insights from their data, facilitating deeper strategic planning and gains in operational efficiency.

• Future-proofing: Technology evolves rapidly, and modernizing applications ensures that businesses remain adaptable and impervious to obsolescence, enabling them to stay relevant in a rapidly changing business landscape.

Overall, modernizing business applications is crucial for corporations to stay competitive, agile, and efficient in today’s dynamic business environment.

Four Steps to Creating Your Application Modernization Strategy

Start your modernization journey by developing a strategy and roadmap for your legacy applications. Begin by assessing — and prioritizing — your business-critical needs. Then, define your objectives and create an inventory of your legacy applications. Finally, use the insights you’ve gained to develop a business-focused application modernization strategy.

1. Define Your Objectives: Come up with clear objectives for modernization, and determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success. Articulate the goals you hope to achieve and document expected outcomes.

2. Inventory Your Applications: Create a comprehensive list of all the legacy applications that could benefit from modernization, including their architecture, dependencies, and data requirements.

3. Analyze Your Legacy Code: Start by documenting existing code structures, dependencies, and business logic. Then, look for opportunities for improvement such as mitigation of security vulnerabilities, reduction of code complexity, and alleviating difficulties with integration.

4. Develop Your Modernization Strategy: Identify which of these applications are most business-critical, and begin the modernization process there. Key components of an application modernization strategy include:
   • Business Alignment: Aligning modernization efforts with business goals and objectives is essential. Partner with departments across the business to understand the specific needs of your organization, your customers, and market trends. Then, prioritize the modernization initiatives that provide the most business value.
   • Analysis: Evaluate the current state of your highest-priority legacy applications. Identify pain points, technical debt, and areas for improvement. Include factors such as performance, scalability, security requirements, and compatibility with modern systems.

Five Steps for Modernizing Your Legacy Applications

Planning and executing a wholesale application stack modernization can be overwhelming. We recommend following these five steps for systematically modernizing your most business-critical applications:

1. Select the Architecture: Understand your architecture options, and select the framework — or frameworks — that will best support your unique business needs.

2. Identify Key Technologies: Choose the new technologies, frameworks, and third-party platforms that will provide the most effective and cost-efficient tools for your business. Then, create a detailed implementation plan.

3. Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies Where Appropriate: Understand how AI capabilities can help with your modernization efforts, and build those capabilities into your plan.

4. Modernize Your Highest-priority Applications: Begin the process of modernizing with your most business-critical applications.

5. Review and Iterate: Review and extend the capabilities of your newly-modernized applications over time. Once they’re more agile and flexible, adding new capabilities will be much easier.

Step One: Select the architecture — or architectures — that will best support your business needs

Application architectures have evolved rapidly over the past few years. Today, there are multiple options available that provide better overall flexibility and scalability. The four most common of these are services-based, event-driven, serverless, and containerized. These architectures can be used in any combination to create the most effective solution.

Service & Microservice-based Architecture 

This option involves organizing software components as reusable services or microservices. These two terms are often used interchangeably, although there are architectural differences between them.

• Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) represents a more traditional approach that focuses on creating a set of reusable services. These services can be accessed by various applications within an organization and can be reused in different contexts. 

• Microservices, on the other hand, offer a more modern approach. They provide smaller, autonomous services that are capable of being developed and scaled independently. The nature of microservices lends them to cloud-based frameworks, as they are readily available in large sets on public cloud platforms and maintained by the cloud vendor.

Key concepts of a services-based architecture include:

• Modularity: Services are self-contained modules that encapsulate a specific functionality or business process. Modularity makes it easier to develop, maintain, and scale complex systems, as changes to one service should not require changes to other services.

• Loose coupling: Services are independent of each other and communicate through standardized interfaces, enabling them to be replaced or updated without affecting other services.

• Reusability: Services and microservices are designed to be reusable across different applications and systems, promoting efficiency and reducing duplication of effort.

• Interoperability: Services and microservices can be accessed and used by different applications and platforms, regardless of the technologies they are built on. This promotes flexibility, agility, and interoperability, making this option well-suited for building complex and distributed systems.

• Scalability: Services and microservices can be scaled independently to handle varying levels of demand, improving performance and resource utilization.

• Discoverability and Governance: Services are typically registered in a central repository or directory, making them discoverable by other components and enabling governance and management of the architecture.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) 

A software architecture pattern wherein components communicate through the production, detection, and consumption of ‘events,’ EDA provides a flexible and scalable way to design and build complex distributed systems. The resulting applications are capable of reacting to changing conditions and handling large volumes of events efficiently.

Key concepts of EDA include:

• Events: Events represent significant occurrences or state changes within a system. These events can range from user actions, system notifications, and sensor readings to changes in data state.

• Event Producers: Components or systems that generate events are known as event producers. Examples include user interactions, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, databases, or any other source that can generate meaningful events.

• Event Consumers: Components or systems that react to events are known as event consumers. They subscribe to or listen for specific types of events and perform appropriate actions when those events occur.

• Event Brokers/Message Brokers: An event broker or message broker receives events from producers and routes them to the appropriate consumers. Examples of message brokers include Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and AWS SNS/SQS.

• Asynchronous Communication: Events are typically transmitted asynchronously, meaning that producers and consumers do not need to be actively connected at the time of event occurrence. This enables loose coupling between components and supports scalability.

• Decoupling: Event-driven architectures promote decoupling between components, allowing them to evolve independently. Event producers and consumers do not need to have direct knowledge of each other, making systems more flexible and resilient.

• Scalability and Resilience: By decoupling components and enabling asynchronous communication, event-driven architectures support scalability and resilience. Components can be added or removed without significant impact on the overall system, and failures in one part of the system can be isolated without affecting others.

• Services and Microservices: Each component of an EDA can and should be implemented using services and microservices.

If your application is event-driven, consider incorporating serverless architecture as well.

Serverless Architecture 

This architecture uses a set of technologies on modern cloud platforms to run code, manage data, and integrate applications — all without managing servers or virtual machines. With serverless, the cloud platform handles infrastructure management tasks, like capacity provisioning, so you can focus on writing code that serves your customers.

Serverless technologies feature automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-use billing model that increases agility and optimizes costs. On AWS, a serverless application starts with AWS Lambda function, an event-driven compute service natively integrated with over 200 AWS services and software as a service (SaaS) applications.

Serverless architecture is very well suited for event-driven systems.

Containerization

This architecture and deployment process bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries it needs to run on any infrastructure. With containerization, you can create a single software package — or container — that runs on all types of devices and operating systems. 

Containers can be created and orchestrated in traditional data center server environments or in the cloud. The advantage that a cloud-based container deployment offers is abundant scalability, a pay-for-what-you-use model (as opposed to a dramatic over-provisioning of servers and virtual machines), and fully managed microservices for containers and their orchestration.

There are several use cases that show how containerization is a valuable architecture:

• Lift & Shift: In cases involving applications that are facing retirement, or if you plan to modernize according to a schedule, this is a very effective architecture to migrate and modernize existing applications. To do this, lift the software from your current system and shift it into containers.
• Refactoring: A fundamental re-architecting of legacy software is often best for critical applications that carry technical debt and would benefit from innovation. By isolating applications and microservices into individual container components, they can more easily be made lightweight, deployed, and cost-effectively scaled.

• Greenfield Applications: Once legacy applications are containerized, you can then easily deploy them with new, greenfield applications. This eliminates the pain and limitations involved with monolithic applications.

Step Two: Identify Key Technologies

Choose the right technologies to utilize in your modernized applications. Select development frameworks and databases that align with the organization’s goals and requirements and provide the most effective and cost-efficient value to your business. 

Then, create a detailed plan that outlines the steps, milestones, and timelines for modernizing each application. To do this, you’ll need to:

• Define key tasks, resources, dependencies, and success criteria for each phase of the modernization process.

• Consider a hybrid approach, with both cloud and on-prem applications, and come up with a modernization timeline to get from one to the other.

• Develop an obsolescence plan for the current platforms and technologies that will be phased out, such as the Strangler development method.

Step Three: Understand the Role AI Can Play in Your Application Modernization Efforts

AI is rapidly changing many disciplines, including software development, by offering many opportunities to innovate and streamline the application development process. It can help drive efficiency, reliability, security, and user satisfaction throughout the modernization lifecycle. To help accelerate your application modernization efforts, it’s crucial to leverage AI where appropriate.

If you don’t know where to start, consider the following capabilities:

• Predictive Maintenance: Once your applications are deployed in production, AI can analyze performance data, detect patterns, and predict potential issues before they occur. By proactively addressing these issues, AI helps maintain application uptime and reliability.

• Natural Language Processing (NLP): AI-powered NLP can be used to extract insights from user feedback, requirements documents, and other textual sources. This helps inform modernization efforts by understanding user needs and preferences more effectively.

• Machine Learning for Performance Optimization: Machine learning algorithms can analyze application performance metrics and user behavior to optimize resource allocation and improve response times.

• Automated Documentation Generation: AI-powered tools can analyze codebases and automatically generate comprehensive documentation, including API references, code comments, and architectural diagrams. This streamlines the documentation process, making it easier for developers to understand and maintain modernized applications.

• Security Enhancements: AI can analyze code for potential security vulnerabilities, detect anomalous behavior in production environments, and proactively mitigate security threats. By integrating AI-driven security measures, modernized applications can better withstand cyber attacks and safeguard sensitive data.

• User Experience Optimization: AI-powered analytics can analyze user interactions with modernized applications, identify usability issues, and provide insights for optimizing the user experience. This leads to more intuitive and engaging applications that better meet user needs.

Step Four: Start modernizing your priority applications using a proven development process

Now that you have your strategy and plan in place, it’s time to begin the process of modernizing your applications by following these nine steps:

1. Migrate and Refactor

Depending on your chosen architecture, migrate each application to modern cloud-based platforms and frameworks. Refactor legacy code to improve modularity, readability, and performance, and to adhere to coding standards.

Then, break down monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable components (e.g., microservices, containers, serverless) to create independent applications that can be modernized, deployed, and scaled independently. 

2. Data Management

Determine how data will be managed in your new architecture. Migrate legacy data to shared databases or fully-managed database services, or employ data replication mechanisms.

3. Security and Authentication

Implement robust security mechanisms, including authentication and authorization, minimized attack surfaces, and the least access principle. Applications should be secure by design with encryption for data in motion and at rest. It’s also important to include intentional segmentation and perimeters in your architecture design and in the workload’s footprint on the platform.

4. Testing and Validation

Develop a testing strategy that includes unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing for your applications. Pay special attention to testing the interactions between applications and services. Automate testing and build it into a CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipeline.

5. Orchestration

Implement a container orchestration platform, such as Kubernetes, to manage the deployment, scaling, and lifecycle of your modernized applications. You can learn more about containers and containerization on AWS’ blog.

6. Monitoring and Logging

Set up comprehensive monitoring and logging solutions (e.g., Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Instana, and Elastic APM) to track the performance and health of your applications. Implement centralized logging and monitoring to gain visibility into the entire system.

7. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Implement CI/CD pipelines to automate the building, testing, and deployment of your applications and services. This ensures a consistent and efficient release process. 

8. Documentation and Knowledge Transfer

To ensure that there’s a record of all your hard work, it’s important to maintain comprehensive documentation for your applications, including API documentation, deployment procedures, and troubleshooting guides. Then, provide training and support for your development teams to familiarize them with the new architecture, technologies, tools, and processes. Finally, communicate all changes to stakeholders and end users to ensure smooth transitions.

9. Post-modernization Support and Optimization

Provide post-modernization support to address any issues that arise after the migration. Continuously monitor and optimize your applications for performance and cost efficiency.

Step Five: Review and Iterate

Modernizing legacy applications is a long-term effort that requires ongoing planning, collaboration, and maintenance. Continue to align your modernization efforts with your organization’s business goals and refine your roadmap as business needs evolve. To do this, ensure that you:

• Continuously enhance and extend the capabilities of your newly-modernized applications. 

• Regularly review your architecture to identify areas for improvement and optimization.

• Systematically identify the next legacy applications to modernize.

• Stay informed about new technologies, services, and features that can enhance your applications and iterate on your architecture as needed.

Help is Here!

Ready to start your modernization journey? VividCloud can help. As an AWS Advanced Services Partner, VividCloud can help you with your assessment, planning, modernization, and cloud migration initiatives. We have extensive experience with all of the application architectures discussed in this article and with transforming legacy applications into modern, state-of-the-art software. 

Contact us to start a conversation about how we can propel your business forward in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.