Why modernize legacy Applications with Microsoft Azure?

The latest technology evolutions have driven organizations and enterprises to drastically transform their operational model and business workflows. As a result of this, enterprises have now started to discern the need for digital transformation services and their impact on redefining business operations. This change has paved the way for the immense growth of legacy application modernization, one of the most sought-after digital transformation services today.

All these years, legacy application modernization has always been a subject of debate and enterprises were reluctant to change. They were not concerned enough about the business threats posed by their legacy applications. But, thanks to the digital transformation era that proved “modernization is the key to innovation.” Having realized this, several enterprises have already begun their legacy app modernization journey to achieve:

• Enhance application stability & performance
• Reduce operation costs
• Increase business agility
• Improve compliance
• Upgrade data security
• Adapt to technology changes

Though the benefits of legacy app modernization are prolific, there are a few app modernization challenges that refrain some enterprises to take the big step.

Know more about: The app modernization challenges and how to address them

Legacy App Modernization with Microsoft Azure

The key to legacy app modernization lies in identifying the right set of tools, platforms, and strategies to modernize and migrate your app to the cloud. This sets the tone for your legacy app modernization; hence it’s mandatory to choose the best-fit solutions for your app modernization journey.

As an industry leader in cloud service offerings, Microsoft Azure could be the ideal app modernization solution mainly because of the wide array of products, services, and solutions offered to modernize and migrate legacy applications to the cloud. Regardless of your data positioning, Azure helps in creating more secured and future-driven cloud solutions. It also offers diverse microservices that help enterprises design, develop, deploy, and operate applications dealing with larger volumes faster than ever.

Some of the significant benefits of Azure microservices are:

• Agility – Individual deployment of microservices will accelerate bug fixes and feature releases and allows you to easily update a service without disturbing or redeploying the entire application.
• Small codebase – Over a time period, the code dependencies in a monolithic application tend to get tangled. Hence, every time when you need to add a new feature to the application, the code must be modified at multiple instances. Whereas the microservice architecture’s small codebase helps to overcome this bottleneck and minimize the code dependencies.
• Fault isolation – One of the significant benefits of microservice architecture is fault isolation. When an error occurs in any one of the microservice or any microservice becomes unavailable, it wouldn’t disrupt the entire application. The rest of the microservices will continue to function & only fault microservice will be fixed and redeployed.
• Scalability – As the entire application is broken down into simpler sub-components for ease of operations it’s easy to scale services independently rather than scaling the entire application. In this case, you can pack multiple microservices onto a single host for efficient resource utilization.
• Data isolation – The basic and simple principle of the microservice architecture is that each microservice should manage its own data. The isolation of each service’s data store limits the scope of change and also aids in maintaining the agility of the individual deployments.

The undeniable reason why several enterprises choose Microsoft Azure over other platforms is its ability to offer solutions for every possible app modernization scenario.

There isn’t a structured migration strategy to adhere to in cloud migration. The migration approach varies depending on your priorities and business needs; hence, selecting an approach that perfectly aligns with your requirements is important. Here are the three maturity levels that are commonly preferred while modernizing legacy applications with Microsoft Azure.

• Cloud infrastructure-based applications – This is a common migration approach that simply migrates or rehosts current on-premises applications to the Infrastructure as a Service platform (IaaS). In this approach, your applications will retain the same composition as before, except for the deployment that takes place in virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. This migration approach is also known as the “Lift & Shift” approach.
• Cloud optimized applications – This migration approach offers additional benefits without altering or restructuring the application code. You can run your application in the cloud with recent technologies like containers and other cloud-managed services. This approach will also enhance the applications’ agility to ship faster by improving the (DevOps) process and enables you to deploy containers on PaaS or IaaS while leveraging the cloud-managed services.
• Cloud-native applications – This migration approach has its focal point on the business needs of your mission-critical applications and carries out the migration of legacy applications to the computing platforms by leveraging the PaaS services. Microservices architecture plays a prominent role in this approach by improving the agility of your applications. Migration to cloud-native applications and microservice-based models will demand new code quite often. Compared to the monolithic and on-premises environment, this cloud-native model offers you a lot of significant benefits.