Application modernization: what does it mean?
In short, it means updating software to adopt the latest information technologies and is one of the fundamental aspects of governance for any company or organization that wants to evolve and optimize its digital IT infrastructure.
Users demand well-defined parameters and digital services from modern applications in terms of interface, functionality, efficiency, and update frequency. However, to achieve these results, existing platforms, which are often too heavy and complex, need to be updated or replaced with more modern and lightweight infrastructures, using microservices and cloud resources, for example. In fact, most legacy applications are not compatible with the cloud resources and distributed architectures that underpin modern DevOps paradigms.
Software Modernization and the Limits of Existing Architectures
Following long-standing legacy development criteria, enterprise digital applications and infrastructures have typically been developed using a monolithic architecture. It is not uncommon to find systems designed decades ago that have evolved over time to consist of millions of lines of code running on large mainframes to manage massive operations in real time.
The main Achilles’ heel of this implementation paradigm is that the interface, backend operating logic, database, and other components are tightly integrated with each other to form a single complex and sophisticated system.
The implementation choices dictated by the technologies available in the past must therefore be maintained over time, with service and maintenance costs that are often too high, especially when compared to the opportunities offered by modern architectural patterns.
It is difficult for both IT managers and development teams to have a complete and detailed understanding of the entire application. Therefore, migration to new hardware and infrastructure requires all the resources necessary for monolithic software to be involved at once. Clearly, this is often a very complex, lengthy, and delicate operation to plan and execute.
Application modernization Benefits
Replacing sophisticated and complex monolithic implementations with modern and efficient solutions means, first and foremost, migrating to mini-service and micro-service architectures. In this way, the application is broken down into well-defined independent modules, which can be updated and managed more easily and scaled using more modern and efficient resources, on-premises or in the cloud, which are often more economical to maintain over time. This is another reason why the concepts of software modernization and application migration often go hand in hand.
Each component can run a process as a service, and the set of services that make up the application communicate with each other through standardized APIs. The immediate advantage of this aspect of application modernization is that it reduces design time, improves the efficiency of development teams that can specialize in developing individual services, and thus shortens the time to market for new features or when it becomes necessary to scale the application. Updates can be developed and deployed frequently, even at different times, without actually involving an entire monolithic application.
The subdivision of functionalities provided by application modernization also allows the creation of generic modules that can be reused in other applications with virtually no modification, thus accelerating development for different applications and increasing the intrinsic value of each individual code process.
Another concrete advantage is that each service can also be distributed across multiple servers or infrastructures, whether proprietary or cloud-based. In this respect, the application modernization paradigm used by modern service providers standardizes and simplifies the adoption of common interfaces, allowing for the rapid adoption of the most appropriate and economical solutions, without redundancy and scaling for power, services, and costs as needs and applications evolve over time.
Even monolithic databases that require expensive proprietary hardware and sophisticated maintenance and backup systems can be transferred to more modern and efficient distributed cloud architectures.