An Architecture-Based Approach to Application Modernization – Technology News – News Block

Enterprise applications have grown to a point where many of them are more complex and slow to respond, and market expectations have risen exponentially in the meantime. Today, customers want responsive and robust applications that have greater agility. This became a concern for many of the companies as the app began to hinder growth and development. The solution is to migrate all applications to the cloud and re-evaluate the potential of those applications. This is where most companies started migrating and started digitally transforming your application to stay relevant in the market. Old application modernization is not a trivial thing for organizations and requires a lot of hard work to get right. The journey could be simplified into three goals: the business goal, the current state, and the application architecture.

Let’s talk about the objectives of the company.

Below are some of the most common goals for businesses, as most companies don’t disclose their purposes to begin with.

1. Faster time to market

This is an example of the internal architecture of any organization. Companies are looking for more agility to have a faster product launch time and make product and process changes. This is necessary to reduce dependency on the IT department.

2. Cost reduction

This is the initial investment required to have smoother sailing later. Businesses must look for high-cost infrastructure that is easy to maintain. A well-rounded architecture will reduce costs in the long run.

3. Improve the efficiency of operations

Data-driven companies are on top right now. Accessing insights using company data, which is robustly available to executives, is a game changer.

4. Improve the customer experience

Customers tend to gravitate towards brands that have an exceptional customer experience. Businesses realize that and have begun to spend time and effort improving their customer experience, and modernization can help you do just that.

5.To support business growth

This is also part of the internal architecture of companies, since they want to grow their business after all. This requires enabling the system and the modules that handle the expected growth without problems.

Reasons for technological modernization.

Application modernization can help you achieve all of the above with the help of the right target. The process could be technology driven and could be initiated to reduce technical debt. This makes it very difficult to improve, maintain and manage the application. Below are some of the reasons for technological modernization.

1.Reduction of technical complexity

This is done to make applications less bulky by breaking complex application modules into simpler components.

2. Improve resilience

The ever-changing marketplace requires businesses to have a fail-safe method to back them up in an emergency. Companies are always vigilant about making their applications more resilient to change.

3.Overcoming technical obsolescence

This requires upgrading the legacy system, as it is essential for companies to replace the outdated with newer technologies, which can be handled by readily available skill sets. These business and technical goals are necessary before any company decides to go through an application modernization process.

Current state of the application

The existing application architecture helps determine the modernization approach. There are also other factors that influence the process, such as design, technology stack, and code quality. A detailed understanding of the current state of the application helps with the modernization necessary for the approach to succeed. A simple analysis can be done: While the end result of the modernization is highly dependent on the current state of the application, the modernization path depends on various application archetypes.

Application Archetypes

An application archetype serves as a roadmap for many other applications with similar characteristics.

Modernization Decision Options

There are multiple objectives for modernization, and there are combinations of approaches that companies can use. Decision options can be applied to any archetype, but archetype-specific decisions require more detail.

UI Application Archetype Modernization

From my earlier point about specific decisions, let’s take an example of modernizing a company’s time to market and user experience for UI application archetypes. Estimation, cost-benefit, and impact assessment analysis can be performed using these steps using full-trip analysis. A detailed analysis will determine current gaps and help determine the optimal user experience based on company standards. The following matrix presents different approaches to UI application modernization based on key decision points.

Classified UI Case

Depending on the current state of the application, the modernization approach for the particular case of UI can be classified into the following points.

1. Micro-frontends:

This is an approach that divides the front-end application into a set of independently deployable applications, also known as microapps. When all seats are assembled, a consistent user experience is created.

2. Modernized UI on top of microservices:

In this state, the UI is separated from the microservice, but the functionality remains the same for microfrontends. The UI is then modernized as a whole and implemented separately from the microservices.

3. Modernized user interface on top of the service layer:

The user interface is separate from the service layer, but both the user interface and the service layer are not divided into smaller parts. The user interface is modernized and can be implemented separately from the service layer.

4. Modernized UI integrated into microservice:

This state splits the user interface and the corresponding microservice and makes them implementable units within the context of the microservice. The UI and microservice can be composed together later if needed.

5. Modernized user interface locally decoupled from the service layer:

In this part, the user interface is separated from the service layer and divided into smaller parts. The separated UI can be recombined and implemented alongside the service layer as a whole.

Conclusion

Incremental and iterative modernization is a better option than the traditional “big bang” approach, which doesn’t deliver the desired result and could create many unnecessary roadblocks. This modernization process keeps the end user on target and provides workarounds. Companies should consider this before beginning the modernization approach.

Businesses have many applications that can be modernized; it is a journey and not a one-time process. Enterprises can make better decisions based on the application archetype, and we explore different paths for modernizing the UI application archetype.

Author bio:

Name: Himanshu Singh

Himanshu Singh is a Marketing Consultant at Rapidops. He is a technology enthusiast and is well versed in software development. He is also interested in domains like machine learning and data science. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the guitar, badminton, and photography.