by: VMware on VMware staff
Part one of this series provided an overview of the VMware IT Performance Annual Report 2022 and VMware IT innovations.
In part two, we examine our modern app innovation.
Decomposing monolithic applications
Legacy applications generally reside in monolithic and tightly coupled environments on-premises and are customer-managed and supported. As a result, legacy applications are expensive to maintain, and create single points of failure that impede innovation.
When monolithic systems become too large and expensive to manage, maintain and support, organizations modernize them. The modernizing journey results in containerizing legacy application components, creating smaller, loosely coupled components that can be deployed and scaled independently. The outcome is increased efficiency by automating tedious manual steps, resulting in lower operating costs.
VMware IT modernizing our applications has produced significant results, allowing us to increase our application-release cadence, boost the number of changes we commit to and lower our change-failure rate, enabling us to serve our customers better and compete more effectively.
Business-critical apps—such as the VMware IT problem management system, the human resources (HR) well-being system, the licensing and entitlement platform, and the corporate documentation repository—were modernized into microservices through our digital transformation.
Driving better results
When we embarked on this digital transformation journey, there were challenges, including security, organizational structure, accessibility, sustainability, legacy change control processes and cost overruns. But when businesses overcome these barriers and accelerate their digital transformation efforts, the benefits are evolutionary, if not revolutionary.
Modernizing our development process aims to improve our time to production with higher code quality. One application using these design principles is VMware Customer Connect, our reimagined customer portal for VMware products, including a knowledge base, documentation, communities, support and education. It averages more than three million active users, 35,000 daily visits, and 10 million monthly page views.
Reaching for the clouds
Without a multi-cloud strategy, adapting our existing infrastructure to meet future digital
needs would require massive investments in noncore assets, such as data centers. This antiquated digital approach doesn’t allow organizations to meet the agility, resiliency and scalability needed to support a successful digital transformation.
To solve this problem, VMware IT built a cloud-agnostic modern applications platform
that allows us to extend our mission-critical application workloads to a multi-cloud
environment. As a result, VMware developers can focus on coding without distracting infrastructure details, in line with current industry DevOps trends.
Innovation can be complex, time-consuming and costly, but the benefits can be transformative. VMware IT continues to challenge and rethink the traditional ways we have done things. No one said it would be easy to change our culture, but we have demonstrated that we are more than capable of facing the challenges as we continue to innovate and evolve.
You can read more about modern app innovation in the VMware IT Performance Annual Report 2022 and in related blogs.
Part three of this series will explore our software-as-a-service (SaaS) innovation.
VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. Contact your account manager or [email protected] to schedule a 1:1 briefing on this topic. To learn more about how VMware IT uses VMware products and technology to solve critical challenges, visit our microsite, read our blogs and IT Performance Annual Report and follow us on Twitter. All VMware trademarks and registered marks (including logos and icons) referenced in the document remain the property of VMware.
