What is a Modern Application?

Modernizing legacy applications can be a tremendous value-add for companies. Application modernizations have the potential to improve performance, cost-effectiveness, and reliability. They enable businesses to deliver value faster to end users while boosting scalability and security. More importantly, modern applications can be a strategic and competitive differentiator over the long term.

But what exactly is a “modern” application?

A modern application incorporates the latest best practices and technologies in IT architecture, software delivery, and operations. This includes making architecture decisions to leverage things like serverless computing and containers instead of maintaining physical or virtual machines. Modern applications take advantage of decades of IT innovation and allow organizations to focus more on business logic and less on IT administration.

By upgrading to containers and serverless infrastructure, engineers no longer have to worry about provisioning hardware, implementing patches, running backups, or updating operating systems. They can layer in robust security protocols, automated disaster recovery, and elasticity that flexes with customer demand. All of this amounts to applications that cost less to maintain while creating better experiences for end users.

When working with AWS, modern applications tend to use the following services:

• AWS Lambda: for serverless compute in event-driven applications
• AWS Fargate: for serverless compute with containerized applications
• Amazon Elastic Container Service: for deploying containers with an AWS-specific solution
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services: for deploying containers using Kubernetes
• AWS Step Functions: for orchestrating serverless workflows

So when should you pursue an application modernization?

It depends on the nature of the business and how much experience the in-house IT team has with modernizations. Updating legacy applications requires much more than simply incorporating one or several of the solutions above. That’s why we recommend two different approaches.

How to Approach Application Modernizations

One of the best ways to get your feet wet with application modernizations is to launch a new feature or functionality on top of an existing application. Ideally, this wouldn’t involve touching any code in the legacy application. Instead, engineers would deploy the new feature as a microservice and become more familiar with modern cloud technologies as part of the process.

Taking this approach minimizes risk and gives teams a chance to learn the ins and outs of various cloud solutions. It’s also a much faster way to test a new offering with end users and gather feedback for future iterations. One of the biggest benefits of modernized applications is that this type of experimentation is much easier to implement.

For those with more modernization or cloud experience, another approach is to continually identify applications that are good candidates for modernization. As these opportunities come up, companies move forward with incremental upgrades. The process here would involve first defining the new interface, then designing, implementing, and testing the new capability in the cloud. Next, engineers would redirect traffic from the old application to the modernized version and eventually decommission the legacy code.

What this approach provides is a more systematic way to update legacy IT in stages rather than pursue a full-scale modernization. It also forces IT teams to think carefully about how they want to prioritize their modernizations. Some will start with non-critical business applications while others will begin with modernization opportunities that have the highest value potential. Again, the best prioritization approach depends on the specifics of the business.

Modernize Legacy Applications with ClearScale and AWS

In any case, application modernizations are difficult to get right. Modernizations can be complex and time-consuming, depending on the size and scope of the project. Some modernizations can take years to execute and carry significant risks. IT teams must conduct comprehensive audits, build clear roadmaps, rewrite or re-platform effectively, and continually optimize cloud environments to achieve modernization goals.

ClearScale is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with 12 AWS competencies. Our team has executed hundreds of migration and modernization projects, enabling our clients to accelerate innovation and create new sources of value from existing applications. We also work closely with customers to launch new services and features on top of modernized infrastructure.

For example, we helped The Salvation Army swap out several outdated components and launch a new reporting capability built with serverless infrastructure. Our work provided an immediate performance boost, unlimited scalability, and an efficient serverless workflow on the reporting side that runs automatically to ensure data is processed successfully before it gets published.

In another project, we worked with a company in the digital advertising space to migrate a database and refactor the application layer. Along the way, we split the database and analytical workloads up between two different AWS services, fixing a major vertical scalability problem and eliminating database management entirely for the company’s in-house IT team.

These are just two examples of the many modernization projects we’ve executed on behalf of companies in a range of industries. Each project is different, which is why having our cloud and modernization expertise on hand is critical.

Thinking about modernizing legacy applications?

Schedule a call with us today to learn more about ClearScale’s application modernization approach.

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