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 improve agility, expedite time-to-market, reduce expenses,and accelerate innovation. Cloud computing supports and enables every one of these goals. That's why it has become needed for firms in every industry to transition from legacy infrastructure to a contemporary, cloud-native environment.

AWS is recognized as the “gold standard”for public clouds, which explains why it is 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 all these great things about application modernization with AWS. Let's explore.

Key Characteristics of Modern Applications

Modern enterprise applications are built using agile software developmentand 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 allow for thousands or millions 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 market
Decrease TCO
Innovate faster



Most of these are solid reasons for the organization to modernize applications with cloud computing. And with 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 approach includes a modern infrastructure that:

Provides a safe 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 Managed Services Partner,provides advanced flexibility and technical freedom so teams can simply eliminate commercial database dependencies while maintaining the performance and functionality of these applications. Another AWS database, Amazon DynamoDBoffers single-digit millisecond performance and near-unlimited throughput for most types 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 secondand scale globally. Plus, they will allow you to build scalable, distributed applications forall forms of needs and use cases.

Furthermore, AWS offers hundreds of tools foryour 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 to help you run your entire existing systems and applicationsin the cloud and get the best return from all of your assets. Equally important, you can 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 utmost agility and TCO benefits.

In addition, the AWS ecosystem can 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 accelerate build and release cyclesas you build modern applications. You can automate test and release processes to reduce error rates and make sure that applications tend to be 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 could lowerthe risk to the complete application and confidently try out new ideas more often. AWS provides a pay-for-value pricing model for modern applications, reducing the expenses of over-provisioning and ensuring that there is a constant 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 have to be modernized. You will also determine the strategic valueof all the applications in the portfolioand execute a specialized modernizationsolution. At the end of this phase, you will have a software modernization blueprint and a complex and functional architecture for the mark state of one or two applications.

In phase two, you'll build the implementation roadmap to produce a modern, agile application architecture. You will even 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 could have a target state data model design, a sophisticated operating model, and key business case metrics.

The ultimate phase is all about embracing a DevOps culture in cloud-native operations included in building a niche site reliability engineering (SRE) capability. You will also 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 might be accomplished by employing an engineer coach who works alongside your team to educate them on cloud-native infrastructure and modern best practices.

AWS can help you begin a cloud-native workflow and overcome the challenges of legacy infrastructure. So, make sure to research and utilize the proper tools, procedures, and processes to decrease the danger of ineffective workflowsand failed modernization.

Refactoring is a great method to split up monolithic applications since it necessitates the usage of cloud-native technology. It will allow you to cut expenses, increase ROI, and decrease the danger of application downtime. With AWS, you might also need the flexibility to lift-and-shift applications or fully re-platform them, so be sure to choose the choice depending on your unique modernization needs.

Some other good practices to optimize your app modernization effort:

Select 1 or 2 applications for the original modernization
Maintain, extend, deploy, and manage these applications to generally 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've seen, application modernization will bring numerous benefits to your organization. However, the time and effort also involves many moving parts which can be overwhelming for an inexperienced team. Axcess.iowill be here to reduce the overwhelm and assist you to modernize your enterprise apps with minimal hiccups. Contact us to get started in your app modernization journey.