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Optimizing Legacy Enterprise Software Modernization

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Public cloud migration is your best bet when it comes to optimizing legacy enterprise software modernization.

Enterprise IT departments rank legacy code modernization as one of their main priorities in 2020, as cloud native security policies become standardized across public cloud service providers. The complexity of software development and support operations for multiple brands and services requires business organizations to adopt a multi-cloud orchestration strategy.

This article will discuss four steps that enterprise organizations can implement to speed up their move to cloud native solutions on public cloud hardware:

  1. Platform Migration Tools
  2. Containerization of Microservices
  3. Agile Teams to Modernize Code
  4. Multi-Cloud Architecture

Multi-cloud solutions avoid vendor lock-in to public cloud service providers, allowing teams to use PaaS/SaaS products from AWS, Microsoft Azure, & Google Cloud Platform interchangeably for better billing rates. Kubernetes solutions support the containerization of microservices in support of data center operations. Where code needs to be modernized to support legacy software applications, Agile teams refactor code in sprints to launch new products quickly.

Platform Migration Tools

The modernization of legacy software applications to public cloud platforms continues to be the force behind Microsoft Azure’s challenge to AWS in the enterprise data center market. The total public cloud market size is “expected to reach $488.5 billion by 2026”.

Google is a distant third in this market, and recently launched the Anthos platform to assist enterprise organizations with better automation in the modernization of legacy software and database applications.

Anthos was launched in partnership with VMware, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, and Lenovo to provide hyperconverged infrastructures at enterprise scale based on Kubernetes & vSphere. The platform supports best practices in DevOps and Agile software management for the containerization of microservices and runtime environments for legacy applications.

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The most recent release of Anthos removed the vSphere hypervisor dependency from VMware and offers a Kubernetes solution for multi-cloud that allows data centers to orchestrate across AWS, Google, Azure, and private cloud hardware. The support for on-premise servers & cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is important in many legacy software modernization projects in enterprise organizations.

Containerization of Microservices

Platform migration tools like Anthos help enterprise organizations shift operations to cloud-native hardware solutions through containerization of microservices. VMware has recently integrated Kubernetes into their industry-leading data center orchestration software through the Tanzu Grid distribution assisted by the Pivotal acquisition.

Using Tanzu, enterprise data centers running VMware products can integrate containerized microservices with Kubernetes. Many development teams are locked into Microsoft platform services with .NET & C++/# development. (Read also: How Containers Help Enterprise Applications.)

Microsoft Azure provides enterprise software pipeline management with version control through GitHub. The Visual Studio suite has industry-leading tools that make software modernization and migration to Azure easier for teams. Azure DevOps include Pipelines with CI/CD to support Agile programming teams with version control & cloud integration.

Azure Pipelines support Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, C#, C++, and Go. The version control integrates with GitHub, Azure Repos, Bitbucket, & many other services. Google Anthos, VMware Tanzu, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with DevOps & Pipeline integration using Microsoft Teams: all three offer customized solutions for enterprise software development.

Each of these products now features the containerization of microservices for legacy app modernization in cloud data centers. The industry leader in this sector is still Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Many enterprise IT departments need to support both EKS and EC2 applications with unified management, where VMware is the most popular solution.

Agile Teams to Modernize Code

Leading enterprise organizations have already adopted Agile project management for software development and DevOps techniques for multi-cloud data center management. The use of Agile teams to containerize legacy applications for public cloud hosting often requires re-coding applications to make them more efficient. DevOps engineers create custom runtimes for legacy code that runs in multi-tenant environments with cloud native security.

Because modernizing legacy applications requires time for programming teams to accomplish, Agile teams use version control with continual integration of products and continual delivery of new features (CI/CD). Git version control allows security upgrades and new versions of code to be pushed to production after being tested for security in sandbox environments.

When up-platforming to a public cloud or modernizing legacy applications, support for the software development pipeline and DevOps techniques is an important aspect to consider. Solutions like Cloudify allow enterprise programming teams to save money by utilizing Jenkins, Terraform, CloudFormation, Azure ARM, Kubernetes, and many other popular DevOps solutions for public cloud environments and toolchains from one access point.

Multi-Cloud Architecture

Unified management is the key to multi-cloud architecture, where system administrators and cloud data center architects are looking for a “single pane of glass” that includes configuration, analytics, and security for networks. (Read also: Reaching for the Cloud Without Flying Too Close to the Sun.)

Software Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) are orchestrated across multi-cloud architecture to take advantage of different public cloud platform strengths. Avoiding vendor lock-in allows enterprise organizations to procure better pricing on the purchase of cloud data center services.

AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and startup competitors all offer preferential pricing to enterprise organizations for SaaS, PaaS, & IaaS products like Amazon Aurora or DynamoDB that IT managers need to unify in a multi-cloud strategy. Kubernetes is an open-source solution released by Google that allows enterprise organizations to operate a cloud data center on the basis of container orchestration. Kubernetes is a major challenge to AWS EC2, which Amazon introduced to build its leadership in the cloud services market. Kubernetes also challenges OpenStack, a popular open-source multi-cloud solution.

As Kubernetes is only one component of multi-cloud architecture, enterprise IT groups currently use solutions from VMware, Mirantis, Nutanix, Red Hat, and other companies for orchestration. A major component of multi-cloud software for enterprise data centers is user metrics and analytics. This must be combined with unified security policies and data compliance regulations.

Unified Software Development Pipelines

Agile teams in enterprise software development can save time and money by adopting unified pipeline management strategies for legacy enterprise software modernization in multi-cloud operations with CI/CD & version control.

Another popular way to save costs over VMware , AWS, and Azure is to adopt open source solutions in Agile project management & DevOps. These solutions allow organizations to effortlessly transition to Cloud-Native architecture by automating existing infrastructure.

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Nati Shalom
Founder and CTO at Cloudify
Nati Shalom
Founder and CTO at Cloudify

Nati Shalom is the founder and CTO of Cloudify, a serial entrepreneur and thought leader in open-source, multi-cloud orchestration, network virtualization, DevOps and more. Nati has received multiple recognitions from publications such as The CIO Magazine and YCombinator and is one of the leaders of Cloud Native and DevOps Israel groups. Nati is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences.