Maintaining legacy applications can be an affliction that saps up energy, time, and resources. Application modernization remains fashionable and involves refactoring, re-purposing, or consolidating legacy software to align it more closely with current business needs and add business value. Traditional methods for modernizing applications include rewriting existing application code to a more modern programming language to salvage parts of the application that might still have value.

While the secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new, adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win. Enterprises that overlook modernization are sure to fail in fulfilling critical compliance and security problems thus, endangering both, their businesses and customers.

In our series of blog posts based on Automated Containerization, here is another quick read on why Enterprises should invest in containerization of applications instead of Lift-and-Shift approach. Legacy applications can be slow and expensive to maintain. If you use the Lift-and-Shift approach to migrate applications to cloud is relatively inexpensive, but ongoing operating costs can be exactly the opposite. The contention is that applications perform and evolve relative to their environments.

Containers, the biggest innovation in the shipping industry, have standardized dimensions so that they can be loaded and unloaded, stacked, transported efficiently over long distances, and transferred from one mode of transport to another. Taking a cue from this, think of a server as a ship and an application as a crate. A couple of decades ago, only one app could be deployed on one operating system meaning, a single crate on a single ship.

With enterprises and ISVs adopting containers and Kubernetes (k8s) to increase the agility and scalability of their applications, they would want more applications to be deployed on k8s. Applications can be a mix of stateful and stateless. Until recently, only stateless applications were supported by k8s. However, with the advent of persistent storage on k8s, stateful applications will be supported. In the pet Vs cattle analogy of service, you would want to treat the storage as cattle.

Gartner defines edge computing as solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation. In this context edge computing is a key consideration while planning your digital business roadmap. Many scenarios like autonomous driving cars and industrial equipment monitoring systems have very low latency tolerance. Large volumes of data are collected and analyzed instantaneously to take action. Even a delay of milliseconds renders the data stale and useless.

As enterprises slowly get out of the shock and awe of the effects of COVID19 on it’s IT operations, they are and will start exploring how to reduce CapEx and OpEx. Most enterprises are not going to let go of existing cash especially if it is a capital expenditure. Any new hardware or software purchase or refresh is out of the window (including Windows licenses). At the same time, they will also start looking for ways to reduce OpEx. For e.g.

Containerizing your age-old legacy applications is the way forward! Yes, it’s true that the benefits attached to containerization are quite rewarding for enterprise apps in the long run. It is also true that not all applications should be containerized. Assuming your application is ready for containerization, you may want to analyze the approach taken to containerize apps, is it a manual or an automated process? Manual process is time-consuming and prone to errors.

Applications deployed years ago may have undergone changes over the years, and there are strong possibilities of the changes not being documented or recorded. All the undocumented changes can bite back as a security breach or get NCs (non-compliance) during an audit exercise. Also, if there is a drive to modernize applications, the true picture of the application may not be documented after interviewing the right people. These applications could be on-premise or on the cloud.

AWS EKS has been supporting Linux containers for a while. However, without Windows container support some of the hybrid applications were not supported end to end. In addition, with the version of 1.14 of Kubernetes, AWS introduced Windows container support and with this feature, you would be able to run Linux and Windows containers in the same Kubernetes cluster namespaces thus enabling your hybrid applications to work on Kubernetes.