Top Key Drivers for Application Modernisation

Application modernisation is a long-term investment that will continue to pay off for years to come. In fact, it can be an essential component of any digital transformation strategy.

But what are the key drivers for application modernisation strategy? What’s driving organisations to transform their applications and why should you care? In this post, we’ll look at some of the top reasons why organisations are choosing to modernise their application portfolios.

Microservices

Microservices is an architecture style where applications are broken down into smaller, more manageable components. The benefits of microservices include faster time to market, better quality and increased scalability. You can build microservices using a variety of technologies including Java SE, Scala or Node.js,’ according to John Roth (a senior consultant at SQS).

Agile delivery

Agile development is a way of building software that allows it to be easy to change and improve the product. It does this by emphasising responding to change over following a plan.

The main characteristics of Agile are:

• Iterative development — you build your product in small chunks, and then test it at each stage. This makes it easier for your team and customers to see what’s going on, so that they can give feedback about what works well or not so well. You can then adjust based on this feedback.
• Feedback loops — if something isn’t working as well as expected, there’s no need to start from scratch; instead, you just go back and make some changes in this iteration (which is called an “sprint”). This means that you don’t need large amounts of money up front so that you can keep adding more features until everything is perfect — instead, your users will help tell you when they’re happy with what exists already!

Testing Automation

Automation is a key part of application modernisation. It is the process to automate repetitive tasks in order to reduce errors and increase efficiency. Automated tests are very useful for testing deployment scenarios such as new features, bug fixes or rollbacks.

• Reduces the time taken for testing new features
• Reduces the time taken for fixing bugs
• Reduces the time taken for rolling back changes

DevOps

DevOps is a set of practices that help teams to work together more effectively, with the goal of automating processes and improving efficiency.

Developers and operations engineers can often have different perspectives on how to approach a problem, so the DevOps culture helps them understand each other’s requirements better.

The core tenant of DevOps is that everyone should be working together across departments to improve efficiency by reducing waste and increasing collaboration between teams.

It promotes culture change in an organisation, which means its success depends on an entire organisation adopting it as part of their workflow or mindset.

Cloud Native

When you’re building an application, one of the things that you should always remember is that it shouldn’t be built for just a single device or use case. It should be built for multiple devices and use cases.

It should also be adaptive to change over time in order to meet new requirements as they arise.

This is Cloud Native architecture — applications that are designed to run on a cloud infrastructure and benefit from the elasticity, agility, and cost effectiveness of the cloud. To achieve this level of flexibility, microservices are used instead of monolithic architectures and containerization allows apps to move freely between hosts with minimal resource overhead.

Containers

• Containers are lightweight and portable. This means that you can easily move them from one environment to another and they will run on any machine that supports the required kernel.
• Containers are easy to deploy. You can use a container as your development environment and then deploy it directly into production, which is much easier than going through all of the deployment steps manually every time you want to test a change or add new functionality.
• Containers can be used for both stateless and stateful applications. Since containers provide an isolated environment, they’re usually used with stateless applications (apps that don’t need persistent storage). However, if you need static data in your application or have other reasons why it needs its own instance of an OS within each container, then containers might be useful for this type of application as well!
• Containers are an important part of microservices architecture because they allow developers more control over their codebase when deploying services based on different platforms (e.g., AWS vs Heroku) at scale across regions without worrying about compatibility issues between those providers’ underlying infrastructures like virtual machines (VMs) running within private clouds where each VM has its own instance OS installed etc.

Application Health Scorecard

The application health scorecard is a tool that allows you to monitor the health of your application portfolio. It provides a view of the performance and quality of your applications, allowing you to see how they are performing against the SLAs that you have agreed with your customers.

The scorecard will allow you to understand:

• The cost and risks associated with maintenance, operation and enhancement activities for each application.
• The performance, availability and security posture of every application in your portfolio by using automated monitoring tools such as Dynatrace or AppDynamics as well as manual reviews by operational teams

Modernise your application portfolio.

• Application portfolio management (APM) refers to the process of managing a set of applications that are in use within an organisation. The goal of APM is to ensure that each application contributes positively towards business goals, and that unnecessary or unused applications can be removed.

Why modernise?

There are several reasons for modernising your application portfolio:

• You will be able to support new technology initiatives — new trends like big data analytics, mobile computing, cloud computing and so on require software solutions which are often incompatible with older technologies.
• You will have better control over costs — many companies find themselves paying too much for software maintenance because they do not have good visibility into what they actually have purchased from vendors in the past or how much those licenses cost them over time.
• You increase compliance with industry regulations — most industries now require their organizations to comply with regulations related to privacy protection, security etc., which may require changes in their existing applications.

Conclusion

Application modernisation can be a transformative process for businesses, but it’s not without its challenges. When developing a modernisation strategy, companies should consider their key drivers for applying new technologies and processes.