It is no secret that companies across all industries are turning towards the cloud to run their IT workloads. 83% of enterprise workloads are predicted to be in the cloud by 2020. Disrupting technologies are forcing technology leaders to engage in new strategies in order to survive.
In Canada, spending on cloud computing will reach $5.5 billion CAD in 2020, double that of 2015 numbers. This could generate more than 50,000 new jobs in the country as more and more Canadian businesses realize that spending on IT innovation can lead to increased business revenues.
To that point, business employment created from cloud computing between 2015 and 2018 could account for 20% of total new jobs.
To be able to spend more on IT innovation, businesses are turning to cloud computing in order to cut down costs and put those savings towards growing the business. For many enterprises, that means modernizing legacy applications to be more agile and cost-effective.
Learn More About Application Modernization:
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What Does Application Modernization Mean
The basic idea behind application modernization is to update your legacy applications in a way that best scales to your company’s robust architecture. Maintaining old and sluggish systems can be a serious strain on IT time and resources, and ultimately can prevent you from spending that time and those resources on innovation.
What You Need to Get Started
Application modernization is no simple task and biting off more than you can chew can only make the original problem worse. The goal is to give flexibility and the ability to continuously evolve.
When looking to modernize your applications, a business-centric approach should be taken. After all, an enterprise portfolio is entirely too large to completely rework legacy applications from scratch and technology leaders like CIOs in charge of such deployments should keep that in mind.
Get Started With Your Application Modernization
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What is the Best Outcome for Your Business?
If you’re a new CIO to a company and everywhere you turn you see legacy applications, it may be tempting to start anew with lightweight, born-in-the-cloud, and less capital-intensive technologies.
But that decision is fraught with risk, as there is no easy formula to transitioning to newer models from legacy systems that could still represent critical business actions.
Before getting started, technology leaders must develop a modernization plan that best suits their business needs. Ask yourself, what does your ideal modernization project look like?
Are you migrating everything at once or in phases? Do you have the resources for that plan? And, are you keeping into account potential roadblocks and leaving room to account for them?
What Legacy Applications are Priority?
The reality may be that your migration is best suited towards moving in stages - or cycles - rather than attempting the whole job at once. As part of developing a modernization plan, technology leaders must decide which legacy systems require the most immediate attention.
“Everybody’s going to have a legacy system; not everyone needs immediate attention.” - Dale Vecchio, research vice president at Gartner Inc.
Creating an IT roadmap that identifies which legacy applications are a priority, and which systems are okay to keep, for the time being, must be done before getting started.
The Role of Containers
A word that constantly appears among application modernization discussions with business leaders like CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, and CDOs is agility. This is the idea that agile organizations have the capability to rapidly respond to change.
In order to reach the level of agility that these technology leaders aim to acquire, new technologies like containers have emerged. Containers have become a vital part of a successful migration from legacy applications and systems.
Its adoption is only on the rise; the 2017 Portworx Annual Container Adoption survey indicated that 32% of companies spend $500,000 or more on container technology.
Containers essentially create a self-contained environment, wrapping around modern applications that can run on any infrastructure. This allows businesses to take every part of what is required to run an application and create a single, portable package.
The use of containers then enables that flexibility between platforms and different cloud environments.
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This simplifies the process and enables agility in the long term by allowing developers to simply package up an application with all of its parts, like libraries and other dependencies, and ship it out as a single package.
Kubernetes On Top
Containers aren’t the only piece of the puzzle. Complex modern applications will require an assortment of different components that can span across multiple containers. In order to manage and operate those different containers, you need a tool to orchestrate the whole process.
That tool is Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is a cloud-native, open-source system that, in short, manages clusters of containers.
It provides the tools necessary for deploying applications, managing changes to existing applications within containers, and scaling those applications as needed, as well as for optimizing the whole system underneath.
The objective of Kubernetes is to eliminate as many manual processes as possible. It is currently the most popular tool for organizing containers. In the above survey, 48% of respondents with more than 5,000 employees use Kubernetes.
Getting Started with Application Modernization
Taking your business through the journey of application modernization is a daunting task.
As a technology leader, you want to be confident that you are steering the business in the right direction and preparing your business to not only handle the disruption of the present day but of the future as well.
To ensure that your organization is capable of taking its legacy applications and turning them into modern-day superstars, Architech's team of experienced Kubernetes engineers is well-equipped to guide you through this journey no matter the stage.
As one of two companies in Canada that focus on Kubernetes on Azure, we offer consulting and engineering services that speed up your production deployment with the adoption of Kubernetes. This all begins with our Kubernetes on Azure Bootcamp.
To learn more about how you can modernize your applications with Kubernetes, download our white paper: The Guide to Application Modernization with Kubernetes. To learn how we can ease your path down this journey, contact us online today.
Read Our Whitepaper On Application Modernization with Kubernetes.
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