The hardest part of any project is getting started, especially when it comes to a huge undertaking like modernizing applications at a large enterprise. With any application modernization initiative, there will be countless moving parts involved, including technical complexity, change management, and financial costs, all of which are compounded by the size of an organization.
For one success story, look no further than BT Group, one of the UK’s largest communications services companies. Here’s the story of BT’s experience in modernizing its complex application estate with help from VMware Tanzu Labs.
Time for a change
Steve Hawkins, senior manager of converged infrastructure at BT, says that in order to remain relevant and competitive, BT knew they would have to modernize both their organization and application architecture. BT wanted to adapt its organizational structure in a way that was conducive to innovation, would accelerate their transition to modern technology and public cloud, and remove complexity so as to reduce time to market.
However, there were a few challenges with this. Folks were unsure of how to kick off the application modernization journey and were hesitant about adopting public cloud. In addition, numerous teams across BT wanted to fully understand the relationship between network components, IT applications, and product variants in order to reduce cost and remove expensive legacy systems—which is incredibly difficult to achieve across such a large and complex IT estate. And, of course, the ability to realize cost savings requires well-defined and realizable plans.
BT’s application modernization game plan
BT’s approach to these challenges involved five pillars, each of which would prove to be vital in their transformation efforts:
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Simplify the architecture
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Modernize the application estate
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Establish a new operating model
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Introduce agile working practices
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Remove legacy (infrastructure)
Through these pillars, BT pivoted to an organizational structure called “squads,” an agile methodology used by top companies like Spotify, to make faster and better-informed decisions with empowered teams. These squads, or smaller teams, are responsible for tasks such as identifying which applications should be refactored or decommissioned, creating decisioning models influenced by VMware's App Navigator approach, building a knowledge repository, breaking down monolithic applications into microservices, and establishing cross-functional teams to accelerate decommissioning.
“Flow of work” app filter to identify best candidates for refactoring
BT worked with VMware to create a robust process, or “flow of work,” to determine which applications should be refactored. This system enabled BT to manage their large application estate by breaking it down into chunks. As application candidates are reviewed in each of the squads, a refinement filter drops the poor candidates. Here, build criteria and decisioning helped accelerate the assessment throughput.
Refactoring squad
BT created “refactoring squads,” which involved pairing with members of the VMware team to efficiently refactor using agile development methodologies. These squads included persistent squad members (the product owner and SA/engineers), transient squad members (DevOps engineers), and VMware Tanzu Labs consultants (product managers and solution architects).
Refactoring approach
In partnership with VMware, BT’s refactoring approach involved choosing slices of functionality that could be easily refactored into a microservice and transitioned to the target platform. To start, the team spent a week analyzing and learning the existing system, developed a notional architecture, and began refactoring slices of functionality. This agile approach to refactoring a monolith minimized risk and accelerated time to value gained from adopting a microservices architecture. The microservices were then put into a CI/CD pipeline, ready for production.
Outcomes
By focusing on organizational alignment and leveraging talent between BT and VMware with Tanzu Labs, BT was able to successfully kickstart their application modernization initiatives, despite their large and increasingly complex application estate, with outcomes such as:
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Modern tooling – Accelerating their operations by investing in strategic tooling to underpin CI/CD, DevOps, and AIOps organizational transformation
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Adoption of DevOps and AIOps – Using technology to drive a more streamlined operating model by adopting DevOps, embedding site reliability engineering (SRE) wherever possible, and using AIOps technology to remain proactive through observability
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Automate everything – Setting goals to reduce manual intervention by 80 percent by optimizing the estate and repairing defects, allowing the organization to instead focus on higher-value activities
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Agility – Developing agile ways of working, reducing long release cycles, and automating testing cycles to react quickly to changes in demand and market conditions
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Data and AI – Leveraging data and analytics to bring more innovative products and services to market faster
According to Hawkins from BT, the organization learned numerous lessons during their application modernization efforts:
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Don't be afraid to try different refactoring approaches in order to determine what works
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Changing the “ways of working” is key and needs its own focus
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Establish a center of excellence for refactoring so as to build best practices and methods
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Functional alignment of the squads for refactoring brings stronger outcome benefits
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Ensure stakeholders continue to be aligned to the objectives of the refactoring
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Know the barriers that slow you down and be prepared to challenge them
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Use the big imperatives to accelerate the journey
Learn more
Want to hear more from Hawkins about BT’s experience in starting their application modernization journey? Watch the full video from SpringOne.
To learn more about how you can get the tools and techniques you need to build your application modernization plans, visit Rapid Portfolio Modernization. And read more on how Tanzu Labs helps customers refactor complex systems in just weeks.
