In the previous blog post, I’d spoken about how Enterprises need to approach Cloud Migration or Adoption with a “workload-first” mindset. In this post, we’ll delve a little into what it takes to ensure the applications (or workloads) that need to go on the cloud are ready to be migrated, and what steps are involved for app modernization.

To begin with, we need to assess a few points before diving into app modernization.

• Application Assessment: Evaluate the current state of the applications, including their architecture, dependencies, performance, and business value.
• Alignment with Cloud Strategy: Align with the overall goals and desired outcomes of cloud adoption. This could include cost reduction, increased agility, scalability, or improved performance.
• Prioritization: Identify which applications to modernize first based on their business impact, complexity, and effort involved to ensure readiness for the cloud.

App Modernization

There are a series of things that need to be taken care of to ensure that the applications run optimally and leverage the advantages of the cloud.

Decoupling Dependencies

• Services as API Endpoints: Expose application functionality through APIs, which decouples components and allows them to interact more flexibly.
• Externalize Configuration: Manage configuration data independently of application logic to ensure that applications are portable and can run in different environments without code modification.

Application Refactoring and Re-Architecting

• Refactoring: Modify the application code to improve its structure without changing its external behavior. This step often involves breaking monolithic applications into microservices to enhance scalability and maintainability.
• Re-Architecting: Redesign the application's architecture to be cloud-native. This can include moving from stateful to stateless designs, adopting microservices, or implementing event-driven architectures. Read up the recommendations at the 12-factor App website for a more detailed breakdown.
• Databases: Ensure that the application’s database setup for persistence will work in the cloud. Ideally, migrate the databases to cloud-native DBs  ****(e.g., Amazon Aurora, Azure Cosmos DB) that provide scalability and management benefits over traditional databases. This process also becomes easier to manage if the app teams follow practices like Database Schema Versioning and Migration automation.

Containerization

While it is possible to have independent, stateless 12-factor apps in virtual machines (and might be required in some scenarios), in most cases, it is best to run your applications as containers. This involves 2 aspects

• Dockerization: Package applications and their dependencies into containers to ensure consistency across development, testing, and production environments.
• Orchestration: Use Kubernetes or other orchestration tools to manage and scale containerized applications effectively.

Leveraging Cloud-Native Services

• Managed Services: Utilize cloud-native services (like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Pub/Sub) for functions that don't require full control over infrastructure.

Adopting DevOps Practices

• CI/CD Pipelines: Implement continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment processes, increasing the speed and reliability of application releases.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Use tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to manage infrastructure in a version-controlled, repeatable manner.
• Auto-Scaling: Enable auto-scaling capabilities to automatically adjust resources based on the application load.
• Monitoring and Observability: Implement monitoring, logging, and observability tools to gain insights into application performance and detect issues early.

Conclusion

This gives us an overview of different things to track and consider when we are modernising our application stack to move to the cloud. Future blogs in the series will dive into details around how other aspects of cloud migration could be adopted, to make the process streamlined.

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