Why is just using the cloud not 'modern' enough?
Many organizations don’t get the full benefits from their investments in cloud migration, and some are even facing a higher TCO than before the migration. The simple reason is that those customers haven’t taken the next step after the migration yet: modernization!
What is modernization?
Modernization goes far beyond a simple ‘lift-and-shift’ migration. It is a multi-step process where existing on-premises applications, infrastructure, and data sources are not only migrated but also updated and transformed into a cloud-based architecture and environment. This transformation enables organizations to fully benefit from cloud computing and unlock new business opportunities.
It’s important to understand the distinction between migration and modernization. Migration is defined as moving IT infrastructure and applications to a cloud provider without making changes to the architecture. This is often referred to as ‘re-hosting’ or ‘lift-and-shift’ and can be the fastest way for customers to realize the benefits of the cloud. Modernization, on the other hand, is the process of progressively transforming applications and infrastructure to higher-value cloud-native services, such as serverless and containers, which unlock new business capabilities, accelerate innovation, and reduce technical debt.
The value of modernization
As modernization is not only a technological challenge if done correctly, but also a cultural change. To get the organization into the culture of change! Only then the organization will get the full benefits:
💰 Cost Savings - The adoption of serverless architecture can lead to a 39% reduction in IT infrastructure spending.
📈 Staff Productivity - Modernization enables IT-teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance tasks. Organizations utilizing serverless architecture report 25% shorter deployment cycles for new features.
📉 Operational Resilience - AWS modernization significantly enhances operational resilience. Businesses migrating to AWS have reported a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime and a 29% reduction in planned downtime.
🚀 Business Agility - Modernization on AWS drives business agility by enabling faster deployment of new features and services. Organizations using serverless architecture deploy new features 41% more frequently. Highly modernized organizations also report a 43% increase in revenue compared to those using basic cloud services.
🌱 Sustainability - AWS’s commitment to sustainability is evident. The platform’s efficiency and scalability contribute to reduced energy consumption and environmental impact for businesses leveraging its services.
Modernization paths
There are a number of paths that organizations can follow to modernize their cloud infrastructure:
Containers: Packaging applications for flexibility
Containers provide a standard way to package application code, configurations, and dependencies in a single object, allowing organizations to deploy quickly, scale infinitely, and run resource-isolated processes. This modernization path is enabled by various AWS services that support containerization.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that deeply integrates with AWS services such as CloudWatch, IAM, and Application Load Balancers. ECS allows organizations to easily deploy, manage, and scale Docker containers. For organizations that prefer Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a fully managed Kubernetes service that simplifies the management and scalability of Kubernetes applications on AWS. EKS runs Kubernetes control planes across multiple AWS availability zones for high availability.
A crucial component of AWS’s containerization strategy is AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers that eliminates the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. Fargate supports both ECS and EKS, allowing users to run containers without having to provision or manage EC2 instances. For storing and managing container images, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) provides a secure and scalable solution.
Serverless: Applications Without Server Management.
Building serverless applications is an approach where applications are built and run without managing servers, eliminating the costs of acquisition and maintenance. This modernization path allows developers to focus exclusively on writing code. AWS Lambda forms the core of AWS’s serverless ecosystem and allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers.
For more complex workflows, AWS Step Functions provides a serverless orchestration service that enables the coordination of distributed applications with visual workflows. This makes building robust, scalable serverless applications easier by integrating Lambda functions and other AWS services into advanced applications.
Managed Data: Optimizing Data Storage and Management
Managed Data Services optimize block storage utilization by replacing manual management with policy automation and standardization. Teams benefit from low-latency read replicas, the ability to recover data, and continuous backup and replication across multiple redundant regions.
Amazon Aurora is a relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, but with the performance and availability of commercial databases at a fraction of the cost. Aurora automatically replicates multiple copies of the data across three availability zones and transparently recovers from failures in less than 30 seconds. For data warehouse applications, Amazon Redshift provides a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service.
For NoSQL applications, Amazon DynamoDB offers a fully managed, multi-region database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching. Organizations that need specific database technologies can choose from Amazon DocumentDB for document databases or Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) for applications that require a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log.
Managed Analytics: Unlocking Data Insights
Using Managed Analytics encompasses a range of services that support analytics use cases, such as data lake initiatives, big data processing, real-time analytics, and operational analytics. This path helps organizations gain insights faster.
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time data such as video, audio, application logs, website clickstreams, and IoT telemetry data. For ad-hoc queries on data in S3, Amazon Athena provides a serverless, interactive query service. For visual data analysis, Amazon QuickSight offers a business intelligence service that enables organizations to build, discover, and share dashboards.
Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it easy to implement search and analytics solutions for applications. For organization-wide data management, Amazon DataZone provides a data management service that helps catalog, discover, share, and govern data.
For large-scale data processing, Amazon EMR offers a cloud-native big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto. For real-time data processing, Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink provides a fully managed service for building, running, and scaling Apache Flink applications.
Why wait?
Modernization may sound complex but you don't have to modernize all workloads at once. Start with an easy workload and get the organisation used to the new way of working and thinking. Besides, modernization is essential for organizations that want to use GenAI at its full potential and who doesn't want that?
