As the pace increases at which business demands that software be consistently delivered, many organizations find themselves with a growing problem. Newer applications, like those written for the cloud, are often able to be delivered and updated at a faster pace than older, monolithic applications that were designed to be run on older architectures and on-premises infrastructure.
Given that many modern applications often have numerous dependencies on their older counterparts, choosing to frequently update one set of apps, while allowing others to lag behind increases not only a gap in bimodal IT but also the level of risk those traditional apps pose to your business as their technology grows increasingly out of date.
This challenge has made application modernization vital in today’s software industry, but organizations struggle with knowing where to start—especially when legacy or traditional apps are crucial to lines of business, and the idea of refactoring or rewriting them is too risky or expensive. Both are completely valid fears, and many organizations don’t have enough manpower to place on such a massive project in the first place. Organizations are slowly learning how to introduce valuable approaches to modernization like agile and DevOps to these applications—we at Skytap have our own proven prescription—and the enterprise has begun looking at solutions like cloud and containers as helping them achieve new levels of software delivery speed, quality, and efficiency.
Learn what application modernization looks like and requires from a software development perspective from Skytap CTO Brad Schick.
Container technology giants like Docker and Kubernetes are getting lots of attention these days as being the future of the way software is delivered. Startups and enterprises alike are sharing their container success stories, but containerization, just like cloud, demands enormous cultural and procedural changes that must be considered, as opposed to simply trying to go “all-in” from the start. As mentioned earlier, traditional, monolithic applications were not original developed for cloud infrastructure or architected for containers, and when starting your container journey there are some functionalities that you need to have in place to empower your teams to make adoption successful and beneficial for your organization.
Unified Management
As was overheard in a recent session on “enterprise-ready container capabilities” at IBM InterConnect, (Check out our recap of that show!) “Everyone’s container journey starts with one container.” In other words, not every application or environment is going into a container on day one, or possibly ever. Taking a unified approach to managing traditional enterprise and containerized applications should provide full transparency from initial builds all the way to through production.
Choice of Tooling
Giving development teams a choice of tooling—especially when introducing transformative containerization technologies and processes—is vital. This increases trust, speeds up adoption by allowing teams to continue to use the tools they prefer and have experience with, and helps avoid vendor lock-in.
Control Over Containers
The available benefits of containers to development teams have been widely documented, but there are a number of benefits around control and visibility that must be made available to operations teams as well. To ensure successful container adoption, operations teams must be able to ensure environments match production—including OS, patch level, virtual hardware settings, and container runtime versions.
Upcoming webinar
To provide greater detail into these requirements, while sharing some new functionalities in the market today, Skytap is hosting a live webinar on Wednesday, April 12th, at 9:00 am PT/12:00 pm ET, titled, “Spring into Containers: Bring New Life to your Old Apps.” Skytap director of DevOps consulting, Kelly Looney, and director of product management, Dan Jones, will cover:
- Why modernizing your traditional applications will accelerate your application delivery
- How to iteratively introduce microservices while keeping your traditional applications running
- How to avoid vendor lock-in when choosing container hosts and tooling
Register now for this informative look into how containerization is being adopted in the enterprise for the modernization of legacy or traditional applications, and take home some best practices that can be applied within your own organization.
