The Ultimate CIO Roadmap for Modernizing Monolithic Apps

Quick Summary: Legacy App modernization is a key to ensure your ability to quickly respond and adapt to continuously evolving market conditions and stay competitive. In this blog, let’s discover crucial insights on how CIOs can overcome challenges and pave the way for innovation, efficiency, and scalability throughout this transformative journey. Don’t miss out on this essential read for a successful app modernization process!

The fast-paced evolution of technology and the ever-changing demands of the market have put constant pressure on businesses for application modernization. These aging applications not only hinder innovation and growth but also pose a significant risk to the companies’ next-gen success. This situation places CIOs under the spotlight, highlighting their crucial role in ensuring a smooth transition to modern and agile applications.

According to Gartner , “80% of CEOs are ramping up their investments in digital technology.” CEOs of innovation-first businesses aim to transition from a sluggish, outdated approach to fast-paced competition in a constantly changing marketplace.

To achieve that goal, the CIO and other technology executives must implement advanced digital IT strategies and tools necessary to accelerate growth.

However, they often encounter the daunting challenge of dealing with legacy applications that have limited upgrade capability. Such lack of flexibility in these vital systems can make it difficult to upgrade features and scale quickly in the open-source and cloud environment.

At Radixweb, our tech leaders have developed the best modernization practices through our work with all-sized businesses, which we are sharing in our blog here, The CIO’s Guide to Modernizing Monolithic Applications. It includes everything you require to ensure an effective transition from a monolithic app to a modernized version.

Let's take a closer look at what is practical for businesses to adopt!

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What is a Monolithic Application?

A monolithic application is a type of software application architecture where all components and gatherings of the application are inter-reliant and tightly interconnected. In simple terms, a complete app is built and deployed as a solo unit, with all the codes and resources bundled together.

In such applications, a single change or modernization can affect the all-inclusive application, which might require complete redeployment.

Let's understand this with an example of monolithic application:

Suppose you have a traditional monolithic application dealing in e-commerce that handles everything from user authentication, product catalogs, order processing, and payments to shipment as a single, interlinked system. All the programs and other features of the application are combined, which makes it challenging to modify or scale each component of the app without affecting the others. Even a minor update of one component could require redeployment of the complete application.

Before moving forward, let's clearly understand the flaws with legacy applications to drive a better solution.

Challenges of a Monolithic Application

Here are some common challenges associated with legacy applications that have monolithic system architectures:

1. Limited scalability

Legacy apps can become problematic to scale as they grow. Any single change to one part can influence the complete system and might require a complete redeployment of the application.

2. Dependence management

Legacy applications often have several dependencies amid components. In most cases, it is complicated to manage and upgrade those dependencies.

3. Lack of agility

Legacy applications are often slow to transform and upgrade. They complicate a business’s need to match the changing market trends and dynamic user requirements quickly.

4. Time-consuming updates

As we earlier mentioned, all components of monolithic apps are firmly interconnected. As a result, a single update leads to extensive renovation. This can be a tedious and expensive process for businesses.

5. One point failure

With all components bundled together in a single application, a glitch in one component can bring down the all-inclusive application.

Are you also feeling exasperated by the limitations of your monolithic application?

Do not confine your success and get over these challenges with application modernization.

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What is App Modernization and the Cloud?

First, let's understand exactly what application modernization is.

As per Microsoft’s definition, “It’s the practice of updating current apps and data to a cloud-first model to align with business needs. This may involve shifting to the cloud.”

While breaking down this definition, we find two vital aspects: migration and the cloud.

Undoubtedly, migration and the cloud are both critical components of monolithic application modernization.

Migration refers to the procedure of moving an app from its current environment to a new one, such as the cloud. In contrast, the cloud is a group of remote servers and resources that can be accessed via the Internet. It also provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure for hosting and accessing applications.

The use of the cloud is becoming common in application modernization, as digitalization is everywhere today.

McKinsey has an interesting take on this,

“If monolithic apps are to be flawless in the cloud, they must be migrated or modernized into the digital ecosystem.”

How to Streamline Applications from Monolithic Architecture to the Cloud?

You might wonder, " How to migrate monolithic applications to the cloud and integrate them seamlessly into the digital ecosystem?"

As we read earlier, rigidity and inflexibility are the main challenges to overcome in a monolithic architecture. Such architecture makes the application a "black box" to the outside world. There is no transparency about its internal procedures, despite being able to observe its inputs and outputs.

Such legacy applications are better kept separated by migrating into the open-source cloud environment, allowing interoperability with other cloud services.

As a result, monolithic code typically needs to be refactored into microservices.

What are Microservices?

Google Cloud simply puts the microservices concept as,

"Microservices architecture (often shortened to microservices) refers to an architectural style for developing applications. Microservices allow a large application to be separated into smaller independent parts, with each part having its realm of responsibility."

The definition consists of two key terms, "small" and "independent".

It is a modern approach that involves breaking down monolithic applications into smaller components. Using a well-defined API (Application Programming Interfaces), these components communicate with one another and perform specific functions.

By developing, deploying, and scaling microservices independently, the system ensures flexibility and agility.

Microservices are like building blocks that can be arranged in diverse ways to create custom app solutions. Each microservice is responsible for a specific task, such as user authentication, payment processing, etc. These services can be developed in a variety of frameworks and programming languages. Microservices can even be hosted on diverse servers.

By migrating monolithic applications into microservices, businesses can build applications that are modern, cloud-native, and can easily evolve with changing business needs. These microservice applications can be -

1. Scalable
2. Resilient
3. Fault-tolerant
4. Facilitates seamless maintenance and updates

Now, the question is: how is that possible with monolithic codes that are so complex and not well documented?

A Proven Approach for Refactoring Monolithic Codes to Microservices

While taking a deep dive into modernizing your monolithic application, we encountered Gartner’s three-step evaluation process of monolithic to microservices with seven options. Here, we explore each option in more detail:

Step 1: Access the suitability of your legacy application

In the first step, businesses need to thoroughly evaluate whether microservice architecture is suitable for their applications or not. It involves accessing key drivers for adopting microservices, such as agility, scalability, and fault tolerance. If your monolithic application is not accomplishing these drivers, it needs to be upgraded to deliver better business value.

Other than that, businesses should also evaluate the cost, complexity, and security risks of existing applications. If you find prohibitive costs associated with complex technology and scalability, modernization is necessary.

Step 2: Analyze your monolithic application architecture

After analyzing the problem in the first step, the second step is to evaluate the application's architecture to discover if it can be broken down into microservices. This involves identifying the different modules and components of the application and their dependencies using seven options.

1. Refactoring: This option allows you to improve the existing monolithic application incrementally. It involves making small updates over time to the existing application. This may include refactoring and optimization of the codebase to make it quicker or feature-rich to enhance the application's value. It is one of the straightforward options without requiring any major changes to the underlying architecture. This option can be time-consuming as well.

2. Encapsulate: In this option, you can use containerization to deploy the monolithic application as a single component of smaller, and independent modules. In this approach, each module can run in its container, offering accelerated flexibility and scalability compared to the traditional monolithic architecture. Containerizing monolithic applications can make it easier to manage the application and its dependencies, but it may not fully take advantage of the benefits of a microservices architecture.

3. Rehosting: Rehosting involves moving the monolithic application to a new hosting environment. This approach can help organizations improve scalability, security, and reliability. Rehosting can be done on-premises or in the cloud, depending on the specific needs of the organization.

4. Replatforming: This option involves moving the monolithic application to a new platform. It can help businesses modernize their infrastructure and improve agility and scalability. Replatforming can facilitate moving the monolith to an entirely new platform or using a middleware platform to modernize the application.

5. Rearchitect: In this option, you can redesign the monolithic system architecture to be more scalable and modular. This approach can involve breaking down the monolith into smaller, more manageable components that can be deployed independently. It also facilitates adopting a microservices architecture to improve agility.

6. Rewrite: Rewriting involves rebuilding the monolithic application from scratch using modern technologies and frameworks. This approach can help businesses modernize their applications and improve their scalability, reliability, and agility. Rebuilding can be done using cloud-native technologies or modern application development frameworks.

7. Replace: This is the final option, involving the replacement of a monolithic application with a new application that is built using modern technologies and frameworks. This approach can help businesses modernize their applications and improve their scalability and reliability. Replacing can involve adopting a microservices architecture or using cloud-native technologies.

Step 3: Evaluate the pros and cons of adopting microservices

After choosing the modernization approach, the decisive step is to evaluate the pros and cons of adopting a microservices architecture. The benefits include increased agility, scalability, and fault tolerance. However, there are also risks associated with adopting microservices, such as increased complexity and the need for new operational processes.

As an ultimate point, modernizing monolithic applications boils down to rightly choosing between rearchitecting, rebuilding, and replacing. The key is to accurately weigh all options and make an ideal choice that will have the desired effect on your business's growth.

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Lesson Learned: Why Application Modernization Projects Fail

All modernization possibilities require huge modifications to the monolithic application codebase. It's not a trivial task to be taken lightly. Monolithic applications tightly hold several realities that involve huge complexity, effort, and time.

According to studies, 79% of application modernization projects fail. Assuming these stakes, businesses need to have a clear understanding of why modernization projects fail. Here, we have discovered some challenges and mistakes which collapse legacy application modernization process that businesses must overcome to succeed in their modernization projects.

1. Technical debt and monolithic code

Dealing with monolithic code and technical debt is one of the primary challenges. Over time, monolithic applications tend to accumulate copious amounts of technical debt, which refers to the accumulated cost of maintaining and updating code. This can make it complicated to modernize monolithic applications, as it creates hurdles to untangling the components of the application and refactoring them into flexible and modular monolithic architecture.

Furthermore, monolithic codes can be complex to work with, as they might be poorly documented and lack test coverage.

2. Complicated application dependencies

Modernizing monolithic applications can also be challenging due to their complicated dependencies. Monolithic applications often have difficult and intertwined dependencies between various components, which can create hurdles while breaking the application into smaller components. In addition, these dependencies also make it difficult to discover which components need to be updated or replaced without affecting other components.

3. Data relocation and integration

Data migration and integration are other concerning challenges for application modernization. Monolithic applications often have tightly bundled data structures and architectures, which sometimes complicate extracting and migrating data to new systems. In addition, the integration of new components into an existing application architecture is also challenging, as the components may not be designed to work seamlessly with an existing data structure.

4. Lack of skills and proficiency

Another challenge of modernizing monolithic applications is the lack of expertise essential to complete the practice. It requires a deep understanding of both the existing and modern technology architectures being used to modernize applications.

Modernizing legacy applications often requires specialized skills, such as microservices architecture design, DevOps practices, and a lot more.

5. Maintaining business continuity and risk management

Legacy application modernization can be a laborious and resource-intensive process, which can impact business revenue streams. Furthermore, it also introduces new risks, such as system downtime, data loss, or security vulnerabilities. This needs to be carefully managed to ensure the safety of business operations and revenue streams.

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Radixweb: Your Application Modernization PartnerRadixweb is an ideal enterprise application development partner for businesses looking to modernize their monolithic applications. With our extensive experience and in-depth knowledge of the latest technologies and customized approaches, we are well-equipped to handle modernization challenges and codebase complexities.Once you have decided to modernize your application, our application development team takes over and thoroughly analyze your monolithic application. We are backed by dedicated developers who seamlessly convert your complex monolithic apps into microservices.By partnering with us, organizations can benefit from an expansive range of application modernization services, such as monolithic code analysis, modernization strategy development, monolithic architecture design, application testing and deployment. We are not just a regular vendor or service provider, but a trusted software partner that aids you examine your roadblocks and drive business success.So, if you would like to experience how Radixweb can help you with application modernization, contact us today.