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 each one of these goals. That's why it has become needed for firms in most industry to transition from legacy infrastructure to a contemporary, cloud-native environment.

AWS is considered the “gold standard”for public clouds, which explains why it's the #1 public cloud company with a market share of over 51%(2021). Using its vast portfolio of services and solutions, AWS has enabled a large number 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 also can enjoy each one of these benefits of application modernization with AWS. Let's explore.

Key Characteristics of Modern Applications

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

They easily scale up or down to support thousands or an incredible number of users, respond in milliseconds, and canmanage huge amounts of data to the scale of terabytes and even petabytes.With modern applications,organizationscan:

Reduce risk
Accelerate time to advertise
Decrease TCO
Innovate faster



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

Application Modernization with AWS

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

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

AWS'cloud infrastructure brings each one of 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 perfect for these requirements.

One particular database,AWS Consulting Partner,provides advanced flexibility and technical freedom so teams can certainly eliminate commercial database dependencies while maintaining the performance and functionality of their applications. Another AWS database, Amazon DynamoDBoffers single-digit millisecond performance and near-unlimited throughput for several forms 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 an incredible number of requests per secondand scale globally. Plus, they will help you build scalable, distributed applications forall types of needs and use cases.

In addition, AWS offers hundreds of tools foryour unique workloads. Use these tools to create 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 in order to run all your existing systems and applicationsin the cloud and get the very best return from all your assets. Equally important, you are able to free your team to target 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 withmanaged open-source frameworks, containerservices, and serverless technologies. You can adopt purpose-built data stores, software automation, and a DevOps model gain the most agility and TCO benefits.

Additionally, 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 one to accelerate build and release cyclesas you build modern applications. You are able to automate test and release processes to cut back error rates and ensure that applications are more reliable at deployment.You may also offload infrastructure management and operational overhead to AWS to lessen maintenance costs and enhance user experiences.

The AWS cloud supports a modular architecture which means that your teams can quickly make changes to individual application components. In this manner, they could lowerthe risk to the complete application and confidently experiment with new ideas more often. AWS supplies 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:

Assess
Modernize
Manage

In the assess phase, you'll analyze your existing application portfolio and use AWS'application modernization questionnaires to spot the systems that need to be modernized. You will also determine the strategic valueof all the applications in the portfolioand execute a specialized modernizationsolution. At the conclusion of this phase, you may have a software modernization blueprint and a complex and functional architecture for the goal state of one or two applications.

In phase two, you will build the implementation roadmap to create a modern, agile application architecture. You may 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 polished operating model, and key business case metrics.

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



Best Practices for Application Modernization with AWS

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

AWS can assist you to set up a cloud-native workflow and overcome the challenges of legacy infrastructure. So, ensure that you research and utilize the proper tools, procedures, and processes to decrease the risk of ineffective workflowsand failed modernization.

Refactoring is an excellent way to break up monolithic applications as it necessitates the use of cloud-native technology. It will help you cut expenses, increase ROI, and decrease the danger 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.

Several other good practices to optimize your app modernization effort:

Select 1 or 2 applications for the first modernization
Maintain, extend, deploy, and manage these applications to meet up your future needs
Determine the mandatory 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 may bring numerous benefits to your organization. However, the time and effort also involves many moving parts which may be overwhelming for an inexperienced team. Axcess.iowill be here to cut back the overwhelm and assist you to modernize your enterprise apps with minimal hiccups. Contact us to begin with in your app modernization journey.