devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Anant Adya

  • 5 App Modernization Best Practices

    5 App Modernization Best Practices

    An organization’s digital transformation is ineffectual if it doesn’t bring out the best from its applications. This is a near-universal concern since most enterprises still have core applications that are architected primarily to work in legacy IT landscapes in an on-premises dedicated environment, slowing down IT and business performance, stymieing innovation and increasing vulnerability to risk. Businesses are paying the price of their technical debt by forsaking agility, adaptability and competitiveness. That’s bad enough in regular times; in a post-pandemic scenario, this can have devastating consequences. 

    Acquiring a few cloud-native applications that are not integrated with existing systems is of limited value and, at best, provides just part of the answer. On the other hand, overhauling the legacy application landscape is usually out of the question. The only reasonable solution, then, is application modernization. But where does an enterprise begin?

    Pick and Shift

    A great place to start is by examining existing applications. Understanding every application’s function, performance and issues and what it can gain from modernization will help to establish a ‘universal set’ to pick from. The candidates for modernization can be prioritized based on technology factors—for example, when the architecture adds cost, vulnerability or complexity—as well as business considerations, such as compromised agility or value potential. Finally, the enterprise needs to weigh the potential benefits, especially ROI, against the difficulty of modernization.  

    Typically, the biggest, most important applications at the core of the enterprise are the hardest to modernize. But without their involvement, the transformation will most often be incomplete. Rather than lifting and shifting these monolithic applications and their vast data to the cloud, the enterprise can enclose them in an API layer to connect them to all the other applications that are being migrated as well as any new applications that are deployed. Using APIs to expose the functions and data of a legacy core system, such as ERP, allows it to be widely used, reused and modified, as well as leveraged to build new solutions and services. 

    Split Into Microservices

    Refactoring is a useful way of modernizing legacy applications that involves breaking them into microservices, which are then connected to cloud infrastructure such as Docker or Kubernetes. These microservices, which are loosely coupled, can be ‘called’ and scaled individually. Since refactoring requires significant rewriting and restructuring of the code, it is best done progressively over several iterations to make sure everything is functioning properly.  

    Provide Full-Stack Visibility 

    Even when an application is modernized into microservices on the cloud, it needs to communicate with other legacy systems in the enterprise. The problem is that now there are more services and environments to monitor and secure, not to mention single points of failure, which not only increases complexity but also denies the enterprise full-stack visibility. But visibility across environments—edge to core (on-premises) to cloud—is imperative for success. This is achieved by ensuring that the modernized applications fit within the organization’s data fabric. The enterprise needs to capture data across the stack, from end to end, and process it in real-time to have an uninterrupted view of the performance and availability  of its applications.

    Modernize the Process Landscape

    A perfectly executed application modernization program can fail to deliver results if the surrounding requirements—for example, planning and meeting quality standards—are not met. Legacy processes can be a drag on modernization efforts. It is therefore necessary to address this issue by rearchitecting processes to fit a more automated setup by supporting code developers with teammates who understand the business requirements, adopt best practices and follow the example of successful digital natives. 

    Track Performance Metrics

    Going back to the point about visibility; enterprises need to establish key metrics to track so they can monitor the performance of applications right down to the code level. And it’s not just applications—the entire infrastructure, from cloud to databases to networks, needs to be tracked continuously to identify problems before they blow up. The performance of applications needs to be compared with the corresponding pre-modernization values to understand the benefits as well as identify areas needing optimization.

    Balance and Act

    Application modernization approaches range from rehosting and refactoring to rearchitecting and replacing, which are progressively costlier and riskier, but also progressively more impactful. Enterprises need to decide what’s best for them based on considerations of effort, cost, risk and result. While some enterprises may go slower than others, eventually they will have to modernize all their applications to be competitive and meet their customers’ needs in the most effective way.

  • Achieve Cloud Resilience Through Systematic (and Chaotic) Testing

    Achieve Cloud Resilience Through Systematic (and Chaotic) Testing

    Constantly testing the cloud in systematic and chaotic ways will help companies avoid cloud failures in a time when downtime means disconnect

    Professionals fortunate enough to shelter in place and work from home can thank cloud for their ability to shift over so seamlessly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Imagine a lockdown without the cloud. Availability and uptime of grocery order systems would depend on a company’s on-prem data centers. Streaming services would stutter and stall during peak hours (after dinnertime and other high-demand times. Critical personal and professional interactions would be limited to voice calls instead of rich collaboration apps, video conferencing or dynamic social media. Many companies would simply just be closed to business, unable to respond to market changes and consumers.

    Now imagine a COVID-19-induced work-from-home scenario with downtime in the cloud. Teams working remotely would fall apart. Deliveries would be scrambled and lost. More importantly, emergency services would see bigger surges with fewer tools to manage them. Medical research teams around the globe currently sharing coronavirus research and data would lose contact with each other, delaying and slowing efforts to treat and cure the COVID-19 virus.

    It may seem that the cloud was built just in time to help with our current predicament. But the concept and foundational systems of cloud computing go back more than 50 years. Popular, practical cloud applications developed more rapidly in the past 20 years, starting with the early iterations of Salesforce.com and more recently with web-based enterprise applications such as Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365. It’s the simplicity of these relatively newer tools that have led to their broad adoption. But this surface layer masks a mind-bogglingly complex undergirding that must be fully understood and tested to be maintained.

    Clouds are strained right now. IBM endured a cloud outage of roughly two hours on June 9. Network monitoring company ThousandEyes told tech news site Fierce Telecom that the global nature of the outage suggested a control-plane issue rather than a physical failure such as a fiber cut or router failure. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Data Center capacity in Europe has shown signs of stress as companies shift to remote work and usage of its communication and collaboration platforms, including Teams balloons. To relieve that stress, Microsoft restricted access to free and trial accounts. Google Cloud’s Kubernetes platform and networking services on parts of the U.S. East Coast went dark for a few hours on June 29.

    To avoid downtime due to cloud failure, companies must build resilience into their cloud structure by testing it in continuous and chaotic ways.

    Conventional testing fundamentally ensures that key applications have been migrated or set up in the cloud and are working properly. This is a great and proven way to ensure that cloud systems meet design considerations and do not change based on application performance. However, conventional testing does not probe for unexpected situations. To do that, advanced operations turn to chaos testing, a technique pioneered by Netflix during its own migration to the cloud starting in 2011. Chaos testing creates turbulent situations that will bring points of failure to light and influence design. Modern cloud systems bring hardware and software together in such complex and fluid ways that standard testing will never suffice. By engaging in systematic and chaotic testing, companies can develop greater resilience in the cloud and through their entire technology systems.

    To achieve resilience, IT must find vulnerabilities not revealed in normal “happy path” testing scenarios. Seeking resilience provides a glimpse into a systems’ reliability and recoverability by executing a carefully planned set of disasters. Such a disaster sequence could include:

    1. Pulling down the network connection for 10 seconds.
    2. Taking a service or server offline.
    3. Choking middleware and watching for anomalies.

    Enterprises just embarking on their migration to cloud must first study and choose a service model that fits best. Firms looking to migrate a whole workload to the cloud should choose the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) option, which allow teams to rapidly orchestrate their test environments on the cloud and quickly set up systems for storage, backup and recovery.

    Organizations already in the cloud or partly migrated must take time to understand their cloud service models. This could prompt the question: Is this model right for my organization in the years ahead?

    While operating in the cloud, these companies can start planning testing scenarios to gauge their systems’ resiliency. In doing so, companies should set an objective and time window for running the tests. Then, the results of these tests help inform the requirement design phase of their cloud setup.

    With all systems and applications in a virtual cloud context, future digital transformations will become more fluid. Properly tested clouds also handle demand spikes more readily and will handle the viral adoption of an application or a rapid location switch or expansion of workforces.

    To become resilient, companies must create resilient IT systems. These systems will rely partly or wholly on cloud infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure grows more resilient through constant, systematic, and chaotic testing. Consistent, creative testing has its own value that allows businesses themselves to become more flexible and resilient enterprises.

  • Embracing the Journey to Public Cloud

    Embracing the Journey to Public Cloud

    One of the fascinating competitions in today’s business world is the one between the digital disruptors—companies whose business vision is rooted in technology and driven by the cloud—and the so-called incumbents.

    One sector where this competition is particularly intense is financial services. In this sector, the digital-first companies typically don’t compete with banks and other financial institutions directly. Instead, they target specific functions based on a clear—and often data-driven—understanding of what customers want. This strategy has proven particularly successful with millennials. For example, until recently the norm for giving money to a friend or family member was to write a check. Now, almost two-thirds of 20- and 30-year-olds use payment apps, such as Venmo.

    In healthcare, a different pattern is emerging, one where digital-first giants either buy or innovate their way into the sector. Examples include Amazon’s billion-dollar acquisition of the online pharmacy PillPack and the new Apple Watch, which is capable of taking electrocardiograms.

    Whatever the sector, digital disruptors have one characteristic in common. They leverage the capabilities of the cloud to the maximum extent possible. A shift in power toward digital-first companies is underway, and the cloud plays a major role in helping these companies establish themselves.

    Many incumbents are just now taking their first steps on the journey to the cloud, and still working on the challenges involved in migrating their existing legacy applications to more scalable and agile public cloud environments. While they’re engaged in this process, digital insurgents are already exploiting the full potential of the cloud to deliver solutions that meet emerging customer needs associated with today’s evolving lifestyles.

    In highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, major brands will not necessarily see an immediate decline in their customer base, nor profits. Nonetheless, digital-first companies are capturing millions of customers annually, and this growth poses a considerable challenge over time. Embracing the journey to public cloud is crucial for legacy enterprises.

    The most successful cloud-based disruptors use experimental sandboxes as a critical component of development. The public cloud can drive progress toward almost any business goal involving IT—operational transformation, new market penetration, new product launches, automation.

    Digital transformation to the public cloud is also the only way companies can leverage storage scalability and the essential innovations of the open-source community. There are still lingering concerns among executives in highly regulated, data-sensitive industries concerning privacy and regulatory compliance, and these can lead to hesitation. The face is, public clouds have been in place for over two decades now, and their security is often superior to older on-premise security. Incumbents can, therefore, tap into the public cloud to ensure safety for mission critical workloads.

    To accelerate the transition to the public cloud, consider the following best practices.

    Learning to Fail Fast and Learn from Experience More Quickly

    The Silicon Valley maxim to fail fast may run counter to incumbent corporate culture, but it is the best path to success in the new digital reality. The key is being able to learn from failures quickly and adjust accordingly.

    Partnering for Progress

    A digital native approach to business is often lacking in the corporate culture of incumbents. Cloud partners that have a digital disruption in their DNA can play an important role in driving cultural renewal at every level of the organization. A reliable cloud service partnership can accelerate concepts, pilots, staffing and other mechanisms designed to deliver value quickly and securely.

    Re-Examining Compliance Processes

    Operations should be streamlined to transform enterprise IT to be well-suited for the cloud. Companies can apply artificial intelligence to supplement human intervention, and encourage cloud adoption among employees. First, building a solid foundation, then working your way up, enables businesses to make important changes that transform the enterprise into an environment that is compliant by design.

    Successfully competing with digital natives means using the cloud to find new opportunities to streamline and better comprehend customer needs and behaviors. It also means being unafraid to change time-honored business practices. At the same time, in highly regulated and data-sensitive industries, compliance and security must be prioritized. Cloud transformation has quickly become vital for companies in all sectors and represents an essential foundation for future business success.