To keep themselves competitive, many businesses have undertaken the journey of application modernisation. They need to reach more customers, in a wider radius, while providing the best version of their service.
But what does modernising an application mean? How are apps modernised? What is the payoff? In the article below, I will answer several important questions about application modernisation and, hopefully, it will be a clearer concept after reading.
What is application modernisation?
Application modernisation is the process of updating your applications to meet the changing requirements of the business and your customers. This usually includes architectural changes to produce a cloud-native application by refactoring components and features into microservices to make full use of the capabilities of the cloud.
Why does an application need to be modernised?
A key driver for businesses is the ability to leverage the availability, resilience, resources and geographic location of cloud providers. In some cases, users of the application are distributed nationally or even globally. One of the benefits of application modernisation is to provide is the best performance and user experience possible wherever and whenever the user chooses to consume the service. During the pandemic, modern applications helped many companies stay in business as it was the only way to interact with their customers. For some services, the convenience was so great that many customers kept on consuming these services digitally even after the pandemic subsided.
How is an application modernised?
This practice often starts in-house/on premises. Typically, your application is modernised by having developers decompose it into a microservices architecture. This separates the application’s feature sets into microservices that can scale independently from one another. For example, an e-commerce store might need to scale up the transaction processing service independently from the quotation service during peak sales times.
Another benefit of this process is the ability to gracefully replace older services or swap-out service provider components without impacting the business.
There are very few businesses that elect to modernise all their applications at the same time for many reasons, including cost, skills and time. In fact, it is quite common to see applications running in the cloud as if they were simply “lifted and shifted” there, with some components or feature sets being implemented as microservices. This is a more gradual approach, but it works for many applications and offsets the cost and time problem, as components are modernised in a phased manner.
What’s the outcome of modernising an application?
As I mentioned above, services will now be able to make full use of the cloud’s capabilities to scale resources dynamically based on what is needed. Suddenly your business doesn’t need to commission an army of new servers to cater for more computing power — it happens automatically with almost infinite cloud resources at its disposal. A modernised application will be able to dynamically scale resources up or down so that it ensures it has what it needs to function and can stop using resources the second it doesn’t need them anymore. The dynamic scaling of resources can potentially also help to lower the bill of cloud provider resources, as you only pay for what you use.
Changes, fixes and updates on microservices can also now be done incrementally, in some cases during the middle of a business day (goodbye late-night maintenance windows), instead of updating the complete application.
In conclusion, to get your existing application to deliver services to customers in the age of the Internet, it needs to be modernised. Modernisation opens new channels to interact, reach and service customers through applications that scale automatically to handle increased demand, can be located closer to your customer, and be seamlessly replaced and upgraded.
If you would like to know more about modernised applications running on modern platforms, please visit our website and get in touch.
About LSD Open
LSD was founded in 2001 and wants to inspire the world by embracing OPEN philosophy and technology. LSD is your cloud-native acceleration partner that provides managed platforms, leveraging a foundation of containerisation, Kubernetes and open-source technologies. We deliver modern platforms for modern applications. For more, visit www.lsdopen.io, e-mail info@lsdopen.io or visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or GitHub.
- The author, Andrew ‘Mac’ McIver, is solution architect at LSD