Organisations are modernising their legacy systems and apps in response to the digital transformation. Today, organisations are experiencing an urgent need to migrate from legacy apps to microservices in order to improve digital customer experiences. Enterprises must migrate legacy apps now more than ever before to remain competitive.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on a number of sectors, which has heightened the need for legacy apps to be transformed. To cope with the new environment, enterprises must migrate existing core business applications to microservices and keep up with the technology.
For this reason, modern organisations can embrace DevOps in order to move legacy apps to microservices. By leveraging DevOps, legacy apps can be transformed into microservices-based mobile apps within a short timeframe. Read this post to learn how DevOps assists you in transform your old applications into microservices.
Microservices challenges in the transition from legacy apps
In legacy applications, an organisation can access everything from tailored applications (developed in-house) to widely recognised applications configured as per the organisation’s needs. Since legacy applications are built in a unique, custom way, migrating them to microservices can be difficult. With the move from legacy applications to microservices, organisations face a range of challenges:
Structure: Microservices have a more complicated architecture than legacy apps. It is, therefore, difficult to decompose the existing apps into microservices at a granular level to align the existing apps with the company’s needs.
Security concerns: Using API gateways, microservices can be protected from external access using an abstracted microservice interface. When working with legacy apps, facade patterns are used to encrypt aggregate data from several services.
Organisational obstacles: In the process of migrating legacy apps to microservices, several organisational challenges arise. One of these challenges is the structure of the organisation. The stakeholders and team members need to have effective communications when building microservice-based apps.
Using DevOps to migrate legacy apps to Microservices
The conversion of old or core apps to microservices can be a streamlined or complicated process, depending on the methodology used. An agile approach to DevOps is needed to transform legacy apps. In essence, DevOps goes beyond a methodology; it’s is a culture. If you plan to migrate your legacy applications to microservices using the DevOps strategy, these are some points to remember.
1. Continuous Integration and Delivery
The process of modernising older apps involves shifting away from traditional processes to more effective and faster ones. By focusing on CI/CD practices, DevOps principles can greatly benefit your organisation. This will also facilitate your move from legacy to microservices by streamlining the code pipeline delivery process. Building, testing, and integrating the code will be continuous when it moves onto the central repository.
2. Automation of primary infrastructure
Moving from manual to automated processes is one of the main objectives of modernising legacy apps. Automating the core infrastructure can reduce time and costs while also enhancing agility and helping you meet business goals. By using a DevOps-based app migration approach, you can also improve performance and increase efficiency.
3. Implementing a Kubernetes app management model
Platforms like Kubernetes offer the capability of hosting, scaling and deploying containers–well-suited to the microservices architecture. You can manage apps and platforms more efficiently by moving legacy apps to microservices and connecting them to a common platform with Kubernetes. In a container environment, it ensures that everything runs smoothly.
4. Embedding security in DevOps techniques
In the DevOps approach, security is usually a concern when converting legacy apps to microservices. Embedding security into DevOps processes is crucial during the transition from legacy apps to microservices. Older apps lack security and governance features. Thus, DevOps can provide security and governance outside of the app domain with regard to the transformation.
What are the advantages of moving to microservices?
There are several benefits to migrating legacy apps to microservices, such as:
- Time and cost savings
- Accelerate time-to-market
- Develop innovative, agile solutions
- Ensure flexibility and scalability
- Respond to needs faster
A notable case study
Walmart had to redesign its massive online business in 2012 to handle 6 million page views per minute on a modern platform so that it could efficiently handle its huge online business. DevOps was adopted to migrate their legacy systems to microservices due to the digital transformation. This led to an overnight increase of 20% in raised conversations and 98% in mobile orders. By refactoring and improving their app and software, they also eliminated their major concern-downtime during events like Black Friday.
Creating a DevOps culture
The digital era is in full swing. With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the country, enterprises are implementing virtual operation methods and updating legacy systems and apps. The migration of legacy apps is an important part of digital transformation. Implementing microservices and modern DevOps methodologies will help old apps to prosper. Digital transformation begins with migrating existing apps to microservices. With our DevOps consulting services, you can optimise the benefits of migration of legacy applications to microservices.
