Webinar | What is Application Modernisation?
Webinar Series | Part Two
Published: 27 April 2022
The world has changed. Customers and businesses now rely on software to get them through their day-to-day. You can no longer operate on the assumption of having a three-tier architecture in your application. Your business must adopt an agile approach to developing applications as well as optimising scalability, reliability and functionality for customers.
We are now seeing multiple consumption models when it comes to applications. Products like SQL Database from Microsoft Azure allows customers to build powerful applications that are resilient in the face of unpredictable web traffic.
There are an abundance of cloud solutions that enable businesses to develop customer facing applications and mobile applications quickly and efficiently. The technology we use today to enable our customers must keep up with the demands of the modern customer – so agile development and cloud solutions are some of the must-haves for businesses that are serious about providing their customers with the best possible experience.
What is Application Modernisation?
So, traditional applications, I built- I opened up Google Studio, and I built this executable that gets deployed with some .NET stuff. Then, there’s a config file that points to a database. Then, I built an application, a web application that’s running up on top of IIS, and it’s using CGI-bin and weird other PHP things running on an application server. On top of all that, I’ve then got a database server at the bottom that I write stuff to. So, I’ve got three servers that deliver an application to an organisation.
Traditionally, people would complain because SQL is not performing fast enough, typically because the company has grown from 20 to 200 staff and the app can’t scale. So that’s my very outdated understanding of what traditional applications are.
Web Application Modernisation
Today, we’re talking about web application modernisation. What is that? How do we approach that?
So I think that I think you’ve got it spot on. I think a lot of our customers, a lot of ISPs out there are still running that three-tier architecture. So they’re looking at a database server, some web hosting in the middle, or they’re running some sort of JavaScript front end on top of an API. And their issues are always scalability, reliability, those kinds of things.
So essentially, in a modern application, you’re still in a three-tier type architecture, but the platform on what you’re developing is different. And then the platform that runs your code is different.
You’d mentioned SQL Server. Well, SQL Database as a service comes in from Azure. But essentially, today, every single industry, every vertical in, in out there in business is today a software house, you know, they have to have an application that’s customer-facing, and most of them have a mobile application.
A Scalable Web Application Powers Business
After COVID last year, e-commerce is the number one go-to platform. One of our customers, their e-commerce store ranked 22nd in the country. And after COVID, when the first lockdown started relaxing, their e-commerce store shot to number one. And that has stayed since September, even after all the stores have opened, their e-commerce store is still the highest performing store.
So customers are interacting with us in an electronic and digital way. And we’re interacting with our own business internal applications, right? So we need to make sure that we make these things scalable, reliable, and all of those things.
That is what a modern application is. It is reliable, scalable, and open.
And you can get data from it, like traffic. And then, of course, you have your B2B portals and API management. Traditionally, you would have a LAMP stack to be running Linux, Apache, Mongo, and Python or something like that on top of that. But so that’s the traditional environments you have that do lift and shift to the cloud through an infrastructure of service. But a modern application takes away that underlying operating system component and allows you to innovate at an accelerated pace on top of the platform because you’re looked after by a cloud provider.
So microservice is one of the modern architectures you get out there. It’s also most likely a cloud-native architecture. And one of the things about microservices is it works well in an enterprise.
But you know, not everybody needs to go microservices. Although nice and fancy, it can add complexity and difficulty. And actually, two things that I did want to mention around application modernisation is that it’s not just about modernising your application, you also need to modernise your processes. So you have to be looking at things like automation and instrumentation fundamentals, because those are going to drive your success in a complex world of microservices, or whatever architecture you’re moving to.
Watch the full video below.
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Businesses are constantly modernising to stay relevant in a competitive marketplace. Don’t get left behind.