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:
- Part 1: 5 Ways to Boost Your Hybrid Cloud Management
- Part 2: Low-Cost Migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
- Part 4: Managing Application Modernization on VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
- Part 5: Why vRealize Cloud Management is Unique
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:
- Enable application discovery, dependency mapping, and network Day 2 operations and troubleshooting. You’ll see a trend in this five-part series that this is a very important step and vRealize Network Insight Cloud is the best for end-to-end network visibility and troubleshooting. See more in this video about Application Discovery Integration with vRealize Network Insight Cloud and read our whitepaper Gaining Application Visibility.
- Conduct Kubernetes to infrastructure inventory, monitoring, logging, capacity optimization, planning, troubleshooting, and compliance. To learn more, view this video about Using vRealize Automation to Deploy Kubernetes Clusters into Supervisor Namespaces. To see a demo, view this short video about Kubernetes Monitoring with vRealize Operations Cloud and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Running WMware Cloud on AWS.
- Combine and offer infrastructure objects with native AWS services (Lambdas, RDS, S3, etc.) in VMware Cloud Template. Read our blog on this topic to see specifically how vRealize Automation Cloud allows you to access native public cloud services to simplify and enhance application modernization.
- Define and self-serve predefined Kubernetes resources, such as clusters and namespaces. You can read more about this in our blog Deploying Helm Charts with vRealize Automation. It discusses how vRealize Automation has native integrations for both Kubernetes and Docker, so you can use these Endpoints and their related Tasks to leverage the power of Helm to deploy applications with a single command.
- Iterate closely with developers by embracing developer best practices in a language everyone understands with infrastructure pipelines, GitOps, and a low-code approach for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). vRealize Automation Cloud helps with rapid, safe, and consistent delivery of the infrastructure that developers and LOBs need to be productive. To see an example of how this works, view this demo video about how to deploy, configure, monitor, and remediate a shopping website using DevOps principles with vRealize Automation Cloud, vRealize Automation SaltStack Config, and vRealize Operations Cloud.
- Extend actions to any system with action-based extensibility (ABX). Read more in our blog about ABX, event broker services (EBS), and APIs for email customized notifications. It shows a functional base for a variety of deployments, including single or multiple resources, private, hybrid or public cloud, custom resources, and Kubernetes resources, such as Namespaces.
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.
Related Links:
- Blog, Part 1: 5 Ways to Boost Your Hybrid Cloud Management
- Blog, Part 2: Low-Cost Migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
- Blog, Part 3: Extending Your Data Center to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
- Blog, Part 5: Why vRealize Cloud Management is Unique
- eBook: Five Strategic Automation Use Cases for Your Business
- Video: Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters as a Service
- Blog: ABX Action Allocated to Multiple Projects – Simplifies Process
- Blog: How-To: ABX/vRO Powershell Actions Which Include Additional Modules
- Blog: vRealize Automation for Self-Service Clouds Across Public Clouds