Application Modernisation

Application modernisation is crucial for businesses today as it enables them to remain competitive, agile, and responsive to ever-changing market demands. The compelling reasons why application modernisation is essential for businesses include:

• Enhanced Performance and Scalability: Modern applications are built with cutting-edge technologies that can handle increased workloads, process data faster, and scale efficiently to accommodate growing user bases. This improved performance translates into a smoother user experience, faster response times, and reduced downtime.
• Improved Security and Compliance: Legacy applications often lack the robust security features and compliance mechanisms that are essential in today’s digital landscape. Modernising applications reinforces security protocols, protects sensitive data, and ensures adherence to evolving compliance regulations, mitigating the risk of data breaches and legal repercussions.
• Reduced Maintenance Costs: Legacy applications often require significant resources for maintenance and upkeep, draining IT budgets and diverting attention from innovation. Modernising applications simplifies codebases, reduces maintenance overhead, and frees up IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
• Enhanced Agility and Innovation: Modern applications are built with modular architectures that enable faster development and deployment cycles. This agility allows businesses to respond quickly to market changes, introduce new features, and adapt to evolving customer needs.
• Improved User Experience and Engagement: Modernised applications are designed with user-centricity in mind, providing intuitive interfaces, personalised experiences, and seamless integration across devices. This enhanced user experience fosters customer satisfaction, engagement, and brand loyalty.
• Enabling Digital Transformation: Application modernisation is a cornerstone of digital transformation, enabling businesses to embrace new technologies, adopt cloud computing, and leverage emerging trends like artificial intelligence and machine learning. This digital transformation empowers businesses to streamline processes, gain insights from data, and optimise decision-making.
• Extending Application Lifespan: Modernising applications extends their lifespan, allowing businesses to continue reaping value from their existing investments. This approach is often more cost-effective than complete application replacement and provides a smoother transition to new technologies.
• Unlocking New Business Opportunities: Modern applications can unlock new business opportunities by enabling businesses to explore innovative features, expand into new markets, and tap into emerging technologies. This adaptability fosters growth and competitiveness in an ever-evolving business landscape.
• Reducing Risk and Ensuring Business Continuity: By addressing the vulnerabilities and limitations of legacy applications, modernisation reduces the risk of system failures, data breaches, and business disruptions. This proactive approach ensures business continuity and protects critical operations.
• Attracting and Retaining Talent: Modernised application environments are attractive to skilled developers and IT professionals, as they offer opportunities to work with cutting-edge technologies and contribute to innovative projects. This talent retention enhances a company’s ability to attract and retain top talent.

Serverless architecture is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation and provisioning of computing resources. Developers can create and deploy code without having to provision or manage servers. The cloud provider takes care of all the underlying infrastructure, so developers can focus on writing code and solving business problems.

Serverless architecture is based on the idea of paying for compute time on an as-needed basis. This means that organisations only pay for the resources that their code consumes, which can lead to significant cost savings compared to traditional server-based architectures.

Serverless architecture offers numerous benefits over traditional server-based architectures, including:

• Reduced cost: Organisations only pay for the resources they use, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure.
• Reduced carbon footprint: Serverless architecture can reduce the carbon footprint of applications by up to 88% by eliminating idle servers, scaling automatically, reducing cooling costs, and reducing hardware waste.
• Increased scalability: Serverless applications can scale up or down automatically to meet demand, without the need for manual intervention.
• Improved agility: Developers can focus on writing code, rather than managing servers and infrastructure.
• Reduced complexity: Serverless architecture eliminates the need for developers to manage servers and infrastructure, which can simplify development and deployment.
• High availability: Serverless applications are highly available, as they are not dependent on any particular server or piece of hardware.
• Improved security: Serverless architecture can help businesses to improve the security of their applications.

Serverless architecture can be a powerful tool for modernising applications. By offloading the management of infrastructure to the cloud provider, developers can focus on writing and deploying code, leading to faster development cycles and improved agility. In addition, serverless architecture can help to reduce costs, improve scalability, and enhance security.

Using serverless architecture to modernise your applications typically includes the following steps:

• Identifying Suitable Applications: Start by identifying applications that are well-suited for a serverless approach. Applications with unpredictable traffic patterns, batch processing needs, or event-driven workflows are good candidates for serverless.
• Analysing Existing Architecture: Thoroughly analyse the existing architecture of the applications you plan to modernise. Understand the application’s components, dependencies, and data flow to identify potential challenges and opportunities for serverless adoption.
• Choosing a Cloud Provider: Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a mature and reliable serverless platform, and Codex is a strong proponent of leveraging the principles of AWS 2.0 and its extensive collection of serverless services.
• Decoupling and Refactoring Code: Break down the application into smaller, independent functions or microservices. This decoupling allows for more efficient serverless deployment and management.
• Leveraging Serverless Services: Utilise the serverless platform’s services for tasks like data storage, authentication, and messaging. This eliminates the need to manage and scale these components separately.
• Implementing Monitoring and Logging: Establish robust monitoring and logging mechanisms to track application performance, resource utilisation, and errors. This allows for proactive troubleshooting and optimisation.
• Automating Deployment and Testing: Employ continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automate application deployment and testing. This ensures consistent and reliable updates in the serverless environment.
• Optimising Cost and Performance: Continuously monitor and optimise application performance and resource utilisation to minimise costs. Consider using serverless cost optimisation tools and techniques.
• Addressing Security Considerations: Implement appropriate security measures to protect the application and its data in the serverless environment. This includes access control, encryption, and vulnerability management.
• Embracing Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and refine the serverless implementation, incorporating lessons learned and adapting to changing requirements.

These are just a few of the success stories of application modernisation on AWS:

• Capital One: Capital One is one of the largest retail banks in the U.S. and it migrated its fraud detection system to AWS 2.0 and reduced fraud by 30%, improved the customer experience, and increased revenue. It now has more than 2,000 applications hosted on AWS. You can read more about their experience with a serverless-first strategy here.
• Expedia: Expedia migrated its core booking platform to AWS and achieved a 20% reduction in costs, a 30% improvement in performance, and increased scalability. You can read how Expedia Group increased agility and resiliency by going all in on AWS here.
• Adobe: Adobe migrated its Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) content management system (CMS) to AWS and realised a 50% reduction in costs, a 30% improvement in performance, and increased agility and innovation.
  Netflix: Netflix migrated its recommendation engine to AWS and achieved a 50% reduction in latency, improved the accuracy of recommendations, and increased customer satisfaction.
• Intuit: Intuit migrated its TurboTax application to AWS and achieved a 40% reduction in costs, a 50% improvement in performance, and increased agility and innovation.