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Managing Application Modernization on VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management – Part 4

In this blog I’m going to discuss managing your application modernization initiative on VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management by looking at why others are taking on this initiative, several challenges to be aware of, and how VMware is best suited to help you achieve your business outcomes. We’re seeing a trend of organizations moving quickly to introduce next-generation applications and services to boost their customer experience. In fact, of the organizations VMware has studied this year:

90% of executives say they are prioritizing
legacy application migration and modernization

Although before we move on, I would like to mention that you can find the complete story of what’s being discussed in this series in our eBook: 5 Ways to Improve Managing Your Hybrid Cloud. And, if you missed the other blogs, here are the links starting from the beginning:

Application Modernization Use Cases

Let’s start by looking at why an organization would consider an application modernization initiative. Most organizations have a significant investment in their existing application portfolio, and these “legacy” applications are some of the most mission-critical applications. This means that few companies want to or can retire these applications and start over because the costs, productivity losses, and other issues are too great. Therefore, application modernization is the most realistic approach for many organizations to realize the advantage of newer software platforms, tools, and architectures. 

In addition, organizations are conducting an application modernization initiative in these ways.

  • Application modernization: Utilize cloud-scale infrastructure and services to extend the value of existing enterprise applications or want infrastructure and operations to be consistent with their on-premises environments for compatibility.
  • New application build-out: Build new applications using native AWS services while leveraging infrastructure and operations that are consistent with their on-premises VMware vSphere environments.
  • Hybrid applications: Build hybrid applications to span data center, cloud and edge—or a combination of these.

Challenges of Application Modernization

We can see that teams need to provide an avenue for modernizing existing enterprise applications and delivering new applications. The cloud is playing an important role in helping technology teams do so. Although, in order to pivot quickly, application developers must be able to work efficiently and without barriers to resources and platforms. In addition, organizations might face some of these challenges that you’ll want to take into consideration.  

  • Lack of easy application portability between on-premises and public cloud environments leading to increased cloud migration costs, time, and risk
  • Disparate tools and security controls to manage on-premises and public cloud environments with a consistent set of policies
  • Multiple operating models, processes, and lack of self-service automation to manage complex and diverse environments consistently
  • Wastage of current IT investments while modernizing applications
  • Skill shortage in application development / delivery and infrastructure teams to develop for and operate in the cloud
  • Disruption to existing business processes and operations due to potential for application downtime during modernization
  • Inability to easily and seamlessly leverage CI/CD methodologies, application catalogs, and native cloud services to enrich enterprise applications due to a fragmented technology ecosystem

How to Ease Application Modernization with vRealize Cloud Management

To overcome some of these challenges that could increase cost, risk, and time of the project, VMware Cloud on AWS and vRealize Cloud Management can help ease the pain. With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can migrate applications to cloud in a fast and cost-effective manner with minimal risks involved. And once in the cloud, they can start their modernization journey with minimal disruption to their business. For example, for companies tasked with building and maintaining Kubernetes infrastructure, VMware Cloud on AWS delivers enterprise-ready Kubernetes runtime environments with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and unified management of those environments with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.

On top of that, vRealize Cloud Management provides modern and agile tools for developers. It speeds developer-ready infrastructure with self-service automation for both Kubernetes and VMs, streamlines the developer experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and incorporates best practices from the DevOps world into traditional infrastructure and operations processes. This way your talented staff is writing code for next-generation applications and not waiting on IT.

To speed and simplify application modernization, vRealize Cloud Management includes these capabilities:

To expand a bit more, vRealize Cloud Management can enable infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to transition to DevOps-ready IT and offer developer-friendly infrastructure. Organizations can promote consistent changes and rollbacks across environments and remediate configuration drift toward desired state configurations. They can establish a common collaboration platform between I&O and developers that they can both understand and operate by seamlessly embedding operations in the application release cycles through pipelines; establishing a commonly understood, low-code language; and using a Git-based source of truth across infrastructure and applications.

Benefits of Application Modernization

An application modernization initiative is helping organizations deliver improved digital experiences to win against the competition, as well as serve and retain customers. Specifically, organizations are driving business outcomes, such as increased business agility, innovation, growth, and market differentiation. In addition to these types of business outcomes, vRealize Cloud Management on VMware Cloud on AWS is enabling organizations to also experience the following benefits:

  • Low risk / Minimize disruption – Modernize applications without application downtime and without any disruptions to existing business processes.
  • Provide portability – No wastage of current IT investments while modernizing applications and supporting application portability to optimize the application placement as needed.
  • Seamless / Empowered IT – Reduce complexity with seamless integration with DevOps and automation tools, application catalogs, modern frameworks like containers and native cloud services.
  • Consistent – Apply the same self-service catalog, content, and policies across private and hybrid cloud environments. Provide centralized and streamlined operations with unified visibility and management across the hybrid cloud environment.
  • Fast – Leverage the same tools, skillsets, and security controls across a hybrid cloud environment that reduces time required to modernize applications.

Plus, organizations can achieve a positive ROI via efficiency, higher productivity, and faster time to value—delivering infrastructure via faster, smaller, more frequent release cycles that allow scalability and reliability. vRealize Cloud Management can enable I&O teams to satisfy developer, SRE and DevOps engineer iterative development needs with frictionless governance for better software quality and/or customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, VMware uniquely offers our customers the flexibility to choose consumption options of on-premises and SaaS vRealize Cloud Management, along with a hybrid subscription of both in a single license. It’s called VMware vRealize Cloud Universal.  It enables you to adopt a cloud-first model at your own pace while protecting existing investments as well as flex for data center extension and during uncertain cloud adoption schedules.  

Summary

In my next blog I’ll discuss why you should consider vRealize Cloud Management on VMware Cloud on AWS and what this winning combination can do for your organization that native public cloud providers cannot.

For the complete story of this five-part blog series, download our eBook so you have all the information in one place.

If you’re interested in moving ahead, you can start with vRealize Cloud Management on VMWare Cloud on AWS Pathfinder learning journey, request a free trial of vRealize Automation Cloud, try our vRealize Automation Cloud in a hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts.

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Ellie Ruano

Ellie Ruano is a member of the VMware Cloud Management team and her responsibility spans across the vRealize and CloudHealth portfolio. Throughout her career she has been passionate about helping…

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