Business is speed through Application Modernization

Cloud transformations can start bottom-up from the applications or top-down from the infrastructure. The applications are the ones impacting business, changing customer experience, and building digital capabilities.

This article sheds light on application modernization, and how cloud transformation journey at architecture, infrastructure, and delivery level, reflects on the business.

INTRODUCTION

Current Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures host applications in every cloud, from private cloud, on-premise, to the public cloud, and edge.?

Building and maintaining heterogeneous environments requires a plethora of varied skills impossible to find in one person and sometimes even one team.?The deployment of legacy workflows requires a large amount of manual labor. On the other end, cloud applications require different operations and development tools.

Development and operations teams should be enabled to deploy different workloads in the same way everywhere, focusing on high-value activities rather than burning their time in configuring and provisioning disparate environments.

High heterogeneity doesn’t help organizations to achieve the velocity to keep up with changing requirements. Creating more complexity causes taking longer to realize business value.

BUSINESS IS SPEED: HOW CAN SPEED BE ACHIEVED?

Acquire speed means fast track the path to production, which is possible removing application deployment bottlenecks throughout automation, improving collaboration between development and operations team, using consistent, highly portable application packages.

Cloud transformations frequently start bottom-up from the infrastructure. Over time you need to do both, getting out from the data center to reduce CAPEX costs, and modernize applications, delivering faster, and increasing security and compliance.

CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS

Cloud-native applications fully exploit cloud limitless computing power on demand. The long-term goal of cloud transformation is to achieve a maturity stage at Architecture, Infrastructure, and Software Delivery level. The evolution of these three domain stages goes from:

• Architecture from Monolithic Applications to SOA (Java, .NET), to Microservices
• Infrastructure, from On-premise to Virtual Machines, to Cloud. Containers run everywhere as infrastructure as code, that virtualizes the Operating System
• Delivery and development methods from Waterfall, to Agile, to DevOps.

Cloud-Native applications capabilities stand in the most mature stage of the three domains: Microservices, Containers, and DevOps. These characteristics bring scalability, resilience, portability, ease developers work avoiding impact on other teams with zero downtime for the business.

Cloud-native applications run on CI/CD allowing to tackling technology and business complexity with continuous integration, delivery, and development, in small increments (my article about that). On the other end, DevOps enables multidisciplinary teams to work collaboratively and continuously deliver high-quality solutions, at a faster pace.?

Acquire velocity in technical metrics means reducing the lead time to:?

a) launching a new application or news release in production

b) make a change

c) time to restore the system or disaster recovery

Those technical metrics should be translated into business data points based on the impact the specific application has on revenue-generating activities (such as applications implementing the current business model, or applications for expansion in new markets, or applications for diversification through innovation).

Shortcutting lead times affects the business in many ways:

• shorter time to market?
• increase security by design embedded at each iteration
• reduce the cost of innovation and risk due to small and continuous increments,?
• Increase efficiencies through automation reducing costs
• Increase quality and team's morale

CONCLUSION

The need of the business is to release seamlessly on-demand in order to improve the customer experience and increase revenue.

Cloud-native apps, CI/CD, DevOps introduce a delivery method that impacts technology and organizational culture. A culture of shared responsibility, end-to-end ownership of software lifecycle, and collaboration.

Making speed a habit can’t be trivial, and it is usually a stage process that requires commitment, keep practicing, fine-tuning behaviors to gaining the rhythm that makes the businesses sustainable long term.