Joseph Szodfridt, Sylvain Carbonell, Rohit Bajaj, and Victoria Wright contributed to this blog post.
When working with organizations in the midst of their app modernization journeys, we at VMware Tanzu Labs frequently hear some of the same questions:
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“What’s in my portfolio and where are the apps running? Our CMDB isn’t up to date.”
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“What apps are good candidates to be containerized? Which apps should be modernized?”
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“How much effort will it take to modernize apps? What’s the expected ROI?”
App modernization can be highly complex and laborious, especially when it comes to understanding the scope of your portfolio. The three areas of portfolio analysis that tend to be the most challenging, time consuming, and error prone are data collection, building a common portfolio model, and accessing analytics for portfolio- and app-level rationalization. Tanzu Labs helps enterprises tackle these challenges with Rapid Portfolio Modernization, a consulting service that enables them to speed up app modernization initiatives using agile techniques, proven practices, and automated tools.
Today we’re excited to announce that our team has built a new proprietary tool to ease the burden of aggregating portfolio data for our customers during Rapid Portfolio Modernization service engagements.
Simplify data collection
To build an accurate model of a portfolio, data like application code, operational metrics, and application configurations must be collected from numerous sources, such as:
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Security and tech debt scanners (e.g., OWASP, Insider, Codescene)
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Static code analyzers, a.k.a. software composition analysis (e.g., Cloud Suitability Analyzer)
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API upgrades and framework portability (e.g., MS API Portability Analyzer)
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Feature and component inspection (e.g., MS App Inspector)
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Network topology and traffic analysis (e.g., VMware Aria Operations for Networks, formerly, VMware vRealize Network Insight)
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Operational data, such as resource health (e.g., VMware Aria Operations (formerly, VMware vRealize Operations), ITSM systems)
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Process-level information
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CMDB information (e.g., ServiceNow)
Running each of these tools can be incredibly time consuming and, in many cases, can require countless repetitive manual operations. The expanded capabilities of Rapid Portfolio Modernization can reduce much of this burden by orchestrating the execution of the utilities that operate against source code with its source code repository integration features. The need for manual post-processing and curation of raw data in order to make it more consumable and contextual in an application rationalization context can also be significantly reduced.
Create a common portfolio model with many perspectives
To conduct application reasoning within a portfolio, a common model must be built that pulls in data from disparate tools. The expanded capabilities of Rapid Portfolio Modernization enable us to ingest output from these various sources, aggregate them, and correlate them to build the model necessary for rapid and informed analysis.
With these new capabilities, we’re also able to view the portfolio model from various levels of granularity and perspectives, which is key to making informed decisions about how any given application should be modernized. At a business unit or portfolio level, we may want to identify scaling or reuse opportunities within our apps or determine the top security vulnerabilities within our apps, each of which can be found using this common portfolio model. A single application can be drilled down to investigate anti-cloud patterns, network security posture, technical health, and technical debt, for example.
Accelerate portfolio analysis and rationalization
By effectively collecting app data and building a robust portfolio model, we’re able to access advanced portfolio analysis and rationalization across numerous types of portfolio attributes. The new capabilities are built on an API-driven data pipeline architecture that allows for an ever-expanding set of analysis features.
For example, a common question that we’ve seen is how to identify suitability for containerization. This seemingly simple ask can involve multiple considerations primarily based on static and runtime analysis, such as technical debt, dependencies, anti-container patterns in the source code, and more. With our updated features, we provide a container-ready analysis plug-in that can quickly analyze container suitability—potentially shaving days off the portfolio rationalization timeline. We can even use these features to generate a data-driven and actionable modernization road map.
Ultimately, these expanded capabilities can help you speed up your modernization initiative and realize outcomes even faster. Learn more about Rapid Portfolio Modernization.
