Getting to Cloud – Faster, better, and certainly cheaper

Extracts from the Deloitte-CII report on Cloud Infrastructure anchored by Monojit Mazumdar, Partner Consulting, Deloitte India

The market for moving applications to the cloud has always been there and will continue to thrive even further. Per a recent study, the cloud migration market is projected to reach US$515.83 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 24.8 percent from 2020 to 2027.

In the past few years, this migration to the cloud has moved beyond the traditional application lift and shifted opportunities to redesign core capabilities in the cloud. Organisations are looking to take full advantage of cloud platform offerings to enhance their existing capabilities. In the post-pandemic world, we will see renewed interest in migrations to the cloud, particularly from organisations that need an efficient, cost-effective way to move their rigid yet essential core assets. There would be an upsurge in creative approaches for financially re-engineering the application modernisation business case. These business cases would largely fall in three key bucket areas, which include the following:

Operate and transform – Many organisations will look for arrangements with their system integration partners to modernise their applications to cloud-native platforms in a few years, keeping organisational operating expenses low. This can be done by designing creative operate to- transform agreements, wherein an organisation’s systems get modernised to cloud-native platforms in a few years while operating expenses stay neutral.

Value for money – In the past few years, system integrators have been able to work on creating/improving their proprietary cloud transition tools, which have simplified the cloud migration process manifolds. This simplification will compel a business case for migrations and modernisations by keeping their cost neutral or even cost-effective.

Application rationalisation – Technical debt accrued over the years in the form of monolithic legacy, hard-wired applications, and assets can be reduced by moving them to the cloud and this transition will beget a concomitant estate optimisation exercise to eliminate redundant liabilities and dependencies. Sunsetting a few unhealthy applications or consolidating them with healthy ones can lower costs and thus, would act as a catalyst for the entire application modernisation business case.

These business cases would get support from large cloud hyper-scalers (such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, etc.) in the form of funding for migration to the cloud. System Integration (SI) partners might also not hesitate in chiming with some investments provided these investments bring long-term rewards in the short term. Deferment of upfront fees post value realisation or commercial share in some other organisation initiative can be a form of long-term reward for the SI players. For organisations, i.e., clients these arrangements would provide faster access to the value levers of the cloud while the hyper-scalers would be able to create stickiness for their cloud and thus, host more client workloads in the future. On the ground these business cases would be implemented with the help of new improved tools and techniques that can help revitalise legacy applications including the following:

Improved Low Code (LC) platforms – LC platforms have evolved over the years by becoming more powerful and capable. Using these LC tools systems designers and application architects can carry out complex tasks and integrations through point and- click rather than having to write code. LC vendors are making their platforms increasingly intuitive and adding functionalities, such as visual debugging, visual business logic design, user interface templates, etc., to their product roadmap to make them more intuitive for developers and the testing community.

LC platforms are proving to be game changers in the space of cloud-based application modernisation and their power cannot be ignored – no wonder NASSCOM predicts India’s LC market to touch US$4 billion by 20254.

New-age code scanning – Legacy code assessment and business rule extraction for reuse of a legacy code, for the purpose of application modernisation, has been a steep challenge for the past few years, but not anymore. Today, improved mining technologies and approaches make it possible to peer inside legacy code regardless of language and extract its business logic with less effort and high fidelity.

New-age enterprise code complexity analysis tools provide features, such as exposure of hidden and convoluted connections between applications, business rules visualisation, and complex business rule extraction that too accompanied by AI/ML features to automate aspects of the code extraction process. This code scanning and business rule extraction can help application teams to bolster their modernisation business case by identifying essential business logic and either refactoring the code or replacing the entire application with a microservice.

Piecemeal modernisation – With the help of a new technique called core mapping, a legacy application can be visualised as a connected graph of constituent parts. Application architects can then identify and use these logical subgroupings to divide legacy interfaces, replacing them with modern Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and service-based techniques.

So where exactly is this entire application modernisation leading towards? Well, the destination seems to be cloud-native architectures. Organisations are understanding the benefits of modernising their applications to make them cloud native. However, a key question is what is cloud native. The seven key characteristics that define a cloud-native application include the following:

Multiple components: What looks like a single application to the end user is delivered by a set of cooperating services

Loosely coupled: Locates and communicates with other services dynamically at runtime; and is independently deployable and replaceable

Elastic and responsive: Scales-up or scales-down independently enabling automatic scaling on-demand and updated & deployed frequently and independently, with zero downtime

Built on open standards: Extensively leverages open-source components and community support

Infrastructure agnostic: Decoupled from infrastructure constraints and free to move as required

Composable: Designed to be a part of other applications and comprises uniform and discoverable APIs

Resilient: Runs reliably, securely, and predictably despite transient issues in the cloud involving network, variable loads, and capacity

Cloud-native applications come with new design patterns, such as:

Event sourcing: It is a pattern that leverages events as inputs and outputs of transactions. Events can be published and subscribed to by other services and are immutable.

Caching: It is a process of storing copies of files in a cache, or temporary storage location, to access them quickly.

Load balancing: By distributing network traffic and information flows across multiple servers, a load balancer ensures no single server bears too much demand. This improves application responsiveness and availability.

Sharding: It is a method for distributing a single dataset across multiple databases, which can then be stored on multiple machines. This allows for larger datasets to be split into smaller chunks and stored in multiple data nodes, increasing the total storage capacity of the system.

Autoscaling: It is a method used in cloud computing that dynamically adjusts the number of computational resources in a server farm—typically measured by the number of active servers—automatically based on the load on the farm.

Serverless deployment: Cloud-native development model that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers. Developers can simply package their code in containers for deployment.

These cloud-native design patterns help organisations across the world to reap some of the many benefits provided by the cloud including:

Scalability: Cloud-native apps. modify and adapt per business requirements and allow frequent software updates per customer feedback.

Cost efficiencies: With open-source systems and tools such as serverless systems that adopt a pay-per-use model, costs are driven down considerably.

Avoid lock-ins: Cloud-native avoids vendor lock-in by allowing the usage of services from multiple cloud providers.

Experience improvement: These applications help take a mobile-first approach, thereby targeting the majority of the millennial audience.

Flexibility: Cloud-native apps. allow organisations to work on multiple cloud platforms, such as public, private, or hybrid without introducing additional requirements.

Reusability: These applications use serverless platforms to upload portions of the code saving cost and time for development teams.

Ease of troubleshooting: Troubleshooting and tracing the origin of the issue is much easier with the entire application being divided into microservices and containers.

Enhanced security: Enable multiple layers of security, such as multi-factor authentication, restricted access, etc.

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