Why?
- Business challenges and opportunities
- Financial inflexibility—legacy licences e.g. Windows, IBM etc.
- Improve security posture—old tech, unpatched
- Retain and attract talented staff
- Exploit existing systems in new products—e.g. expose APIs to new customers
- Avoid just lift-and-shift to cloud—also bring value
Challenges
- Always harder than it looks
- “Good enough” reigns supreme
- Many choices of target software and platforms
- Deeply entangled systems
- Organizational culture
- Unrealistic expectations—not always about cost saving
Six Traits of a Successful Application Modernization
Business Case Oriented Around Value
- Involve the entire organization—avoid business cases that are simply IT-based vanity projects
- Use Google fit assessment tool,
mfit
- Works offline, so no connection to Google Cloud required
- Leverage Forrester TEI reports for cost impact
Use a Mixture of Approaches
- Retire
- Refactor
- SaaS
- Migrate in-place
- Rewrite
- Containers—Google Cloud container-based cloud
- Make use of other platform components, e.g. Pub/Sub
- Otherwise it is just IaaS
- More value
Maintain Familiarity
- Tools—Cloud Code, Cloud Shell, Cloud Workstation (hosted dev environments)
- Security—code is in the cloud, not on the laptop
- Managed Prometheus
- Anthos connected clusters—bring existing clusters under Anthos management
Push the Envelope
- Embrace e.g. event-driven architecture
- Cost optimize
- Utilize Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) to provision infrastructure
Team Effort
- Utilise expertise from partners/vendors
- CAMP and DORA
References