Enterprise application modernization with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Microsoft Azure cloud platform for a global logistics company
It is a truth universally acknowledged by businesses across the globe: innovation is a necessity. However, many businesses are restricted because of technical debts. This blog is written for leaders who are tasked with closing the gap. A cloud approach to modern infrastructure, process, and architecture (IPA) equips top IT decision-makers with a realistic, affordable way to apply modern applications.
Application modernization is a strategic decision factoring in organizational needs, priorities, and budgets. Considerations include modernizing the application experience and access method and driving create new workflows around the application through integration and automation.
Traditional applications limit an enterprise’s ability to move quickly in two ways. First, the monolithic architecture of a traditional application is inherently inflexible, creating exponential inefficiencies when building and running applications. Second, traditional applications constrain development for new, cloud-native applications that depend on them. Application components in a monolithic architecture are tightly coupled; changes to any individual component require changes to other components. This architecture translates to an inefficient code base that passes waste onto teams
The goal of traditional application modernization is to optimize both the velocity and the efficiency of an application’s release cycle. By introducing new technologies and adopting new processes, businesses can deliver value faster.
Innovation velocity is the speed at which a team can present something new and useful to its customer at a lower cost and is often accompanied by technologies and techniques. Process efficiency is the team's ability to improve the way it brings new products to market with a small amount of conflict and is often associated with processing methods such as ITIL, Waterfall, DevOps, or Agile.
They may modernize the application code itself with analytical tools to increase programmer productivity and improve performance. Modernizing dev, test, and production methods and platforms, either for individual applications or as part of a composite application, while leveraging new business models with COBOL investments is another thought.
Client Use Cases
The client is one of the global leaders in the logistic industry. With more than 300,000 people in over 200 countries, it has delivered more than a billion parcels worldwide. This organization needed to transform some of their legacy enterprise application into microservice based application and deploy those applications to cloud.
The key focus areas include, application modernization strategies, planning on Application migration to cloud and breaking monolithic applications to microservice based applications assisting in containerizing these microservice based applications. Delivering apps and features faster with containers and container orchestration, implementing DevOps lifecycle and providing a stable environment and seamless operations support. It also aims at enhancing security and enabling intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence along with reducing the overall total cost of ownership (TCO)
Tech Mahindra designed and built the solution with various Microsoft Azure services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure DevOps, Azure databases, Azure policy, Azure sentinel. This design also includes other third party tools like Splunk, Helm. The complete landing zone was built using terraform, an Infra-as-Code (IaC) tool.
The services which are offered are:
- Establishment of the right cloud strategy as per the business needs and evaluating the impact of issues related to security, governance, risk, and compliance.
- Defining the cloud-based application modernization strategy
- Implementing the project
- Provided Managed Operation Services like, 24/7 operations and monitoring of the platform by our support engineers, providing L1, L2 and L3 supports, escalation to Microsoft Support team, managed blue/green deployment process and updating and maintaining the workload templates
These services help the businesses with:
- Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Better agility, scalability, and portability
- Improved security with Azure’s distributed
- Denial-of-services and threat protection
- Better performance from highly available application.
- Less downtime
- Faster time to market from weeks to days
- Reduction in IT admin cost due to the selfservice module implementation to provision for the resources
- Improved productivity due to less operational activities and more focus on the app deployments rather than managing the cluster
The Way Forward
Nowadays, everyone wants to transform their monolithic legacy application into a microservice based application so that their applications can become an agile and scalable product. To respond to the rapid changes in today’s world, application must be quick to deploy, always available and easy to maintain.
These microservice-based applications reduce the application downtime since all the microservices are like individual apps which are loosely coupled to each other. So, maintaining, deploying, scaling, upgrading or even deleting these microservices are very easy to achieve.
