While the technology behind application modernization gets most of the focus, it is the business necessity that is the driving force. Containers are a big part of the modernization effort to delivers competitive business outcomes. These legacy apps are still vital to the business, but they bring constant performance challenges that slow down business processes and require unsustainable maintenance costs.
The goal of moving applications to the cloud is to take advantage of the potential for greater business agility, cost savings, scalability and security. But the challenge of these legacy apps is they cannot operate in these virtualized environments without modernization. Their current hardware environments carry a lot of technical debt, such as mainframes, which create constant integration, workflow, networking, admin, and security challenges.
Meeting Modernization Goals Incrementally
But the time and expertise needed to recode the application to make it compatible with the cloud can be more than most businesses can shoulder. Containers have become the way to shift the balance in this equation. It’s predicted that 75 percent of global organizations will run containers by the end of 2022, according to Gartner.
Application modernization doesn’t have to mean using containerization to go straight to a cloud-native application requiring intensive code rearchitecting. While most enterprise apps are legacy apps, most won’t need to be moved to the cloud since they’re not mission critical, and the cloud doesn’t provide tangible benefits.
Your business can also take smaller steps to get from monolithic to containers and microservices for those mission critical apps where cloud provides big benefits. An understanding of the basics of containers provides the answer to how businesses can benefit at all stages of digital transformation.
The Basics of Containers
You can find in-depth Techolution containerization blogs covering the technical aspects. But the short story is containers are a self-contained package that is abstracted away from the operating system, machine, and the code. So, it’s all about the operating system that determines which app can use server resources in a cloud configuration.
This creates a lightweight container that can run on any infrastructure. It’s faster and uses fewer resources than a virtual machine, which increases server use efficiency to reduce server and licensing costs. Containers also make it easier to update and deliver version releases. The result is much simpler programming and modernization path.
Advantages of adopting containers include:
- Agility because container instance startup happens in seconds rather than minutes for a VM, and the scale up or down rapidly
- The smaller footprint enables five times the density of VMs
- You can deploy them in any cloud or environment, which gives you the ability to run the containerized application in hybrid and multicloud environments.
- Release changes can happen faster with any bugs isolated to the specific container as opposed to an entire VM or server
- Containers save operating costs over VMs because they use fewer resources by holding only specific connects or a single microservice.
- Greater security since they are self-contained and do not interact with other containers.
These container attributes can provide a wealth of business outcomes but are still abstract to stakeholders without a specific business goal in mind. It’s the business outcomes made possible by containers that ultimately matter most.
The Business Outcome Possibilities of Containerization for Modernization
Using containers and microservices to drive application modernization should focus on specific business outcomes that make it more competitive through faster speed of delivery and greater availability to:
- Produce new products more efficiently and faster
- Increase performance and shorten time to market for services
- Deliver innovative products and services to the market faster
- Speed internal operations that make the business more competitive
- Reduces costs for maintenance and the chance of outages because of capacity problems.
- Stronger resilience and greater accessibility
- Easily manage IoT platform data
- Support scalable running of AI/ML workloads
While containers and application modernization go together, the possibilities of how your business can implement them and achieve specific business outcomes are different for every SMB or enterprise. Techolution brings the expertise of application modernization from countless successful projects across many sectors.
As your digital transformation partner, we can collaborate on determining the apps that deliver the biggest modernization benefits and develop a fixed project expense plan for how to get there. Containers for modernization can lead to many business improvements for end users, operations, and customers.
Successfully and quickly reaching the desired goals with containerization and microservices often start with an experienced partner. By starting with the desired goals, Techolution can become part of your team to ensure containerization delivers the right business benefits of application modernization to your business right now and down the road.
To learn more about how Techolution can make your journey to the cloud fast and efficient with the best business outcomes, visit our cloud services page.
