BrainBlog for vFunction, by Jason English
We’re riveted by risk. Captivated by collapses and crashes. Humans are hardwired to be fascinated with failure.
This natural survival imperative can even influence our approach to the high-stakes game of application modernization, where learning or ignoring lessons from the project failures of others can determine an organization’s survival or failure.
What are some of the anti-patterns of application modernization worth watching, so that we can put failure in the rear-view mirror?
1. Inadequate requirements for microservices goals
A team can set out to do ‘just enough’ to modernize their application suite by simply lifting-and-shifting it from on-premises or co-located servers to cloud infrastructure – and thereby assure the real goal of modernization is never met.
In my previous post “Flip the Script on Lift-and-Shift Modernization, with Refactoring” we discussed how the brute-force migration of code and data that were never intended for a future of elastic capacity and microservices agility would fail to deliver the expected benefits of cloud modernization every time.
While the path of least resistance is usually the most desirable one, we need to make sure we don’t set the bar for success too low – for instance, only making cosmetic changes to a user interface. If the underlying application code isn’t appropriately refactored to be microservices-ready for cloud autoscaling goodness, chances are you aren’t really modernizing at all.
Code-level observability of running functional threads within the ‘as-is’ application can show where call dependencies, memory and CPU usage, synchronization and data states are intertwined, so that resolving and refactoring these complexities can untangle knots that accelerate the modernization push.
2. Misguided business value expectations
A CTO friend of mine once referred to a large enterprise’s IT program management team as “huffing their own ROI fumes” when it came to evaluating technology initiatives…
Read the entire story on the vFunction Blog now: https://vfunction.com/why-application-modernization-strategies-fail/
©2022 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. At the time of writing, vFunction is an Intellyx customer. Image source: John Morgan, flickr open source.
