We’re evolving, and we want you to be the first to know! Our unwavering…
native computing and achieve higher agility, resilience, and efficiency.
We’re evolving, and we want you to be the first to know! Our unwavering…
Dialectica, a global leading information services company with over 1,200 employees, has chosen Infinitum for…
We’re evolving, and we want you to be the first to know! Our unwavering…
Dialectica, a global leading information services company with over 1,200 employees, has chosen Infinitum for…
Legacy technology stacks usually become a limiting factor for businesses efforts to stay relevant and competitive in the marketplace.
Organizations need to adapt quickly to market trends and a modern technology stack plays an important role in business agility.
Application Modernization is a framework for migrating legacy technology stacks to modern cloud computing environments. Instead of replacing altogether legacy applications, application modernization follows a low-risk and high value incremental cloud adoption strategy. The application modernization framework focuses on modernizing Infrastructure, Platforms, Architecture and Processes.
They represent the possible methods to modernize a legacy application in the context of cloud adoption.
Rehost: Lift and shift, migrate to modern infrastructure with minimal or no changes to the application itself.
Revise: Change certain components of the application to utilize a cloud PaaS or other cloud native platform. This strategy usually involves re-platforming without significant architectural application changes.
Refactor: Re-architecture the application to optimize it for cloud migration. This usually means using microservices and domain driven design patterns, and extensive code base changes.
Rebuild: Discard the existing application and replace it with a new one. This usually follows a phased retire of the legacy application by using the strangler pattern.
Whether you refactor, rehost or replatform a legacy application, the following key elements play a crucial role in the success of application modernization.
Cloud Native applications are distributed in nature and use a mix of containers, serverless, PaaS and IaaS that require robust orchestration tools.
The vast number of components, many of which are transient, cannot be managed efficiently without an automation platform.
Distributed, Dynamic technology stacks are impossible to operate without a cloud native observability platform.
Zero trust requirements for distributed cloud native applications can’t be met without securing both the SDLC pipeline and the runtime.
The onset of microservices revamped the whole software delivery lifecycle and led to the emergence of new technologies to package, deploy, run, and manage applications. Docker Containerization was a major technology breakthrough that revolutionized application packaging, delivery, and publishing and quickly became part of the modern application toolkit. The shift from monolithic applications to containerized distributed applications created new operational challenges such as service discovery, load balancing, dynamic scaling, and service resilience.
Kubernetes is a cloud native platform that became the de facto orchestrator for containerized distributed applications. Designed to be infrastructure agnostic, Kubernetes creates an abstraction of the underlying cloud provider and simplifies application publishing in multi cloud environments. Modern Kubernetes distributions in addition to the out-of-the box scaling, self-healing, load balancing and scheduling capabilities, support custom extensions that integrate Kubernetes with third party platforms, and extend Kubernetes orchestration capabilities.
Multiple Kubernetes offerings are available by cloud providers and software vendors packaged either as fully managed PaaS, control plane managed IaaS, or self managed, with a plethora of automation and infrastructure integrations and with various service level assurances.
Automation has been around for many years in the form of scripts and schedulers that standardized IT operations and reduced manual workload. These legacy automation tools are usually recipes that include the steps to complete a task and although they are efficient in automating simple tasks, they are hard to implement in complex cloud environments.
Automation platforms that use the declarative programming paradigm are better suited to manage transient and dynamic cloud environments. Platforms like Infrastructure as Code, Ansible, and GitOps are now a necessity for successful application modernization and cloud migration. Modern automation platforms declarative model, version control, repeatability, and scalability, allows DevOps teams to efficiently deploy, manage, and scale complex modern applications.
DevSecOps, stands for development, security, and operations. It's an approach to automation, and platform design that integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle.
DevSecOps means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start. It also means automating some security gates to keep the DevOps workflow from slowing down. DevSecOps achieve this by shifting security left from runtime environments to the pipelines, to code repositories and to the developer workspace. It also expands the collaboration between development and operations teams to integrate security teams in the software delivery cycle. Incorporating testing, triage, and risk mitigation earlier in the CI/CD workflow prevents the time-intensive, and often costly, repercussions of making a fix postproduction. In short, DevSecOps helps maintain velocity without compromising security.
DevSecOps can be implemented to break down silos between development, security, and operations so the more secure software can be released faster. Organizations should take a step back and consider the entire development and operations environment. This includes source control repositories, container registries, the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, application programming interface (API) management, orchestration and release automation, and operational management and monitoring.
Modernized cloud native applications run on top of various IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and in many cases, they are deployed in multi cloud environments. Using multiple cloud services, distributed across cloud providers complicates cloud-native application security and compliance. The cloud security industry soon realized that to address the unique security challenges presented by cloud adoption, a new set practices and tools had to be invented. The set of these new practices and technologies established the foundations for the Cloud Security Posture Management and Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms frameworks.
Cloud Security Posture Management solutions focus on cloud infrastructure security and can detect and remediate unauthorized access, insecure configurations, denial of service, data leaks, compliance violations, software vulnerabilities, privilege escalation and other threats. By implementing CSPM, organizations can enhance their cloud environments security posture, enforce security policies and ensure compliance.
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms focus on cloud native application and business-critical workloads security posture. CNAPP solutions protect the whole software delivery life cycle, from code repositories to CI/CD pipelines and to runtime environments, and are a crucial part of the DevSecOps toolkit.
Cloud native applications typically have a high velocity release cadence, are dynamic in nature and rely heavily on distributed computing. Legacy monitoring solutions fail to track a comprehensive state of dynamic cloud environments as they miss key capabilities to holistically observe the full stack of infrastructure, platforms, applications, and user experience. Also, legacy monitoring systems are typically focused on specific aspects of the technology stack and tend to hinder collaboration across teams by creating silos and more complexity. Operating a multi cloud technology stack without a cloud ready observability platform is a major shortcoming for any organization.
Cloud ready observability platforms are fundamental in operating reliable application environments and establishing DevOps and SRE practices. All teams in an organization will benefit from deeper insights and better understanding of the complex, dynamic interdependencies of modern cloud native applications.
The proliferation of microservices and multi cloud environments introduced new business, security, and operational challenges. Organizations now build modern applications using polyglot architecture across multiple clouds with diverse APIs and network implementations. These application environments tend to increase network and communications complexity, risk, and cost. Applications in a multi cloud environment must have specific implementations for each cloud provider they use.
Service Mesh tries to address these issues by introducing an abstraction layer between the applications and the cloud provider network implementations. The infrastructure layer of Service Mesh simplifies the design and implementation of modern distributed application communications in multi cloud environments.
Application Modernization and Service Mesh contribute to successful cloud migration by enabling zero trust networking, multi-cloud support, policy enforcement, traffic management, service resilience and agile release cadence. The Service Mesh includes key capabilities like Service Discovery, Service Authorization, Traceability, Mutual TLS, Outlier Detection, Circuit Brakers, Policy Routing, Advanced Load Balancing, Canary Deployments, Dark Releases and many more. Furthermore, introducing a Service Mesh into the application stack will benefit organizations anticipate outages, detect abnormal patterns, audit SLOs and enforce compliance.
Application delivery platform role is to deliver applications reliably and securely to end users. Application delivery controller (ADC), Load balancing, application delivery management (ADM) and application delivery network (ADN) are typical components of an Application delivery platform. ADCs employ algorithms and policies to determine how inbound application traffic should be distributed. Modern application delivery controllers can inspect packet headers for keywords or requested file types and direct the request to the appropriate server based on this information. Load balancers work by monitoring the health of backend resources and only sending traffic to servers that can fulfill the application request. An ADM refers to technology that provides holistic visibility into how applications are delivered across multi-cloud environments. ADN refers to services deployed via a network that help ensure high availability, security, and visibility for web applications. ADNs work by speeding up datacenter load times and increasing IT visibility across the application delivery process.
Modern application delivery organizations can achieve improved efficiency of enabling anywhere access to business apps via the web instead of relying on locally installed applications for each user’s device. For employees to do their best work, they need high performance and availability from their web and cloud applications. Furthermore, they offer application performance benefits across mobile networks.
At the initial cloud adoption phase, organizations will seek to move applications and data from legacy computing environment to cloud computing environments. These cloud migration projects, while offering substantial benefits, come with their own set of challenges and risks. Migrated applications having integrations issues that cause disruptions, unforeseen costs, inefficient resource utilization, sluggish performance from miscalculated latency budget are some of the most common cloud migration risks.
The success of any cloud migration project depends on the clear understanding of the current application stack, the selection of migration tools, a detailed migration plan and extensive testing.
Business growth and contractions can be efficiently addressed when using a cloud native architecture that scales out on-demand.
Modern Application typically increase resource efficiency and drive down operational expenses.
Cloud Native Applications offer enhanced security, observability and data insights that contribute to business resilience and performance.
Application Modernisation Solutions
Our expertise in modern cloud native technology stacks from multiple customers, guarantees that your cloud adoption and migration strategy will deliver the desired results.
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