Tag Archives: cloud

The Journey of Legacy to Modern Infrastructure Architectures

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Current-day literature regarding digital disruption and technology modernization commonly discusses legacy-monolithic infrastructure/applications and modern-day architectures such as microservices. However, less literature exists on the journey from legacy to modern infrastructure architectures. In this blog post, I aim to provide a high-level roadmap to help organizations navigate their technology (infrastructure/application) architecture modernization journey.

To start, let’s introduce the concept of greenfield and brownfield. In the second edition of The DevOps Handbook, authors Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis discuss these concepts in their original terms. Initially used in urban planning and building projects, greenfield is when buildings are built upon undeveloped land. Brownfield development is when we build on land previously used for industrial purposes, potentially contaminated with hazardous waste or pollution [1, p. 66]. In this blog post, greenfield represents new, unbuilt infrastructure and systems, and brownfield represents existing infrastructure and systems with complex interdependencies.

An organization’s strategy has a lot to do with how IT disciplines move forward with building infrastructure and systems. Many organizations have a “cloud first” strategy today or are striving to become “cloud first” throughout their modernization journey. This means greenfield initiatives should be built in the cloud before traditional on-premises (on-prem) infrastructure is used. Using cloud-native technologies to build new infrastructure architectures that support application and data architectures is a surefire way to modernize an organization’s technology stack. In fact, many start-up companies use a “cloud-only” strategy that ensures they don’t introduce legacy systems and technology to their ecosystems from the beginning.

While it’s fair to say that greenfield builds are easier to modernize than brownfield builds is true, it’s not necessarily “easy.” Arun Chandrasekaran (2022) from Gartner, Inc. depicts an illustration showing that the IT workforce has more skill and experience with traditional infrastructure architectures than modern serverless and container infrastructure architectures [2]. From experience, I can attest to Chandrasekaran’s illustration. Unless an organization brings in a small army of highly skilled and experienced cloud practitioners, either via direct hires or consultants, they are bound to experience their share of bumps, bruises, lessons learned, and re-work as they continue to learn and mature in the cloud.

The story changes significantly when it comes to brownfield or already existing systems. This is frequently where digital modernization becomes a journey, and strategy is a major factor in how organizations move their technology architecture forward. Assuming an organization is just beginning its modernization journey, it potentially has a long road in front of it. Even if an organization’s digital modernization journey has already started, the road forward is usually full of turns and hills.

To help with cloud migrations, Amazon Web Services (AWS) describes four phases of cloud migration. The phases include (1) Prepare, (2) Plan, (3) Migrate, and (4) Operations [3]. These phases are an essential component of digital modernization and can be used to help your organization with its migration. Check out AWS’s knowledge article “Phases of migration” for more details on their four phases.

Looking deeper into the migration process, Stephen Orban, author of “Ahead in the Cloud,” Chief Technology Officer at the New York CTO Club, and Vice President at Amazon Web Services [3], outlines six different migration strategies for moving applications to the cloud. AWS commonly refers to these migration strategies as “the 6-R’s.” The 6 R’s include (1) rehosting, (2) replatforming, (3) repurchasing, (4) refactoring/rearchitecting, (5) retire, and (6) retain [4]. All six strategies apply to brownfield builds.

Figure 1: The 6 R’s of cloud migration strategy.

  1. Rehosting, or “lift-and-shift,” is moving your existing infrastructure/systems “as is” to the cloud.
  2. Replatforming, referred to Orban as “lift-tinker-and-shift,” involves using some cloud services to optimize a system, but it doesn’t change the core of the system.
  3. Repurchasing or moving to a different product. This typically involves eliminating brownfield builds and replacing them with Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
  4. Refactoring/Rearchitecting is described by Orban as re-imagining how an application is architected and developed, typically using cloud-native technologies.
  5. Retire or simply get rid of. Orban says that between 10% and 20% of an organization’s IT portfolio is no longer useful and can be retired.
  6. Retain usually means “revisit” or do nothing, at least for now. This strategy may be best suited for systems recently brought online on-prem or for organizations early in their cloud migration journey.

Orban says that enterprises usually begin to contemplate how to migrate an application [to new platforms and infrastructure] during the second phase of the migration process – Portfolio Discovery and Planning. A firm understanding of the systems existing in an organization’s IT portfolio is key to creating a migration strategy. Differentiating the low-hanging fruit that can be easily harvested from complex monolithic architectures with multiple interdependencies will help organizations choose the right combination of strategies to suit their migration needs.

“This [portfolio discovery and planning] is when they determine what’s in their environment, what are the interdependencies, what’s going to be easy to migrate and what’s going to be hard to migrate, and how they’ll migrate each application.” – Stephen Orban

As you can see, greenfield initiatives are easier to build in the cloud as they are not subjected to the monolithic and interconnected infrastructure that exists within an organization’s IT ecosystem today. Brownfield initiatives require significantly more strategy, planning, and often time to migrate into the cloud. Organizations will encounter use cases for greenfield and brownfield builds throughout their journey. Having the strategy and skills is vital to a successful digital modernization journey.

References

[1] G. Kim, J. Humble, P. Debois and J. Willis, The DevOps handbook, 2nd ed., Portland: IT Revolution, 2021.

[2] A. Chandrasekaran, Compute evolution: VMs, Containers, Serverless – Which to use when?, Gartner, Inc., 2022.

[3] Amazon Web Services, “Phases of migration,” 2022. [Online]. Available: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/strategy-database-migration/phases.html. [Accessed 9 October 2022].

[4] S. Orban, “Linkedin – Stephen Orban,” [Online]. Available: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-orban-7086471/. [Accessed 9 October 2022].

[5] S. Orban, “6 strategies for migrating applications to the cloud,” Amazon Web Services, 1 November 2016. [Online]. Available: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/6-strategies-for-migrating-applications-to-the-cloud/. [Accessed 9 October 2022].

[6] Y. Perry, “AWS migration strategy: The 6 Rs in depth,” NetApp Cloud Central, 25 July 2019. [Online]. Available: https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/aws-migration-strategy-the-6-rs-in-depth. [Accessed 9 October 2022].

Digital Disruption: The Cloud

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In a previous blog post titled “To Disrupt, or Not to Disrupt?” I introduced a layman’s definition of digital disruption: “A digital capability-driven change that shakes the industry’s core.” [1]. I can think of no better example of modern digital disruption than the cloud. Not only has the cloud disrupted the Information Technology industry, but the cloud has had some disruptive impact on most industries.

But why is that? After all, isn’t the cloud just “someone else’s computer?” Looking through a narrow scope, yes, the cloud is ultimately someone else’s computer, but what happens when you combine the power, versatility, and resiliency of the cloud with its secondary effects? I think you will see an entire paradigm shift in how organizations operate today. This is made possible through both technology and methodology disruptions.

It’s no secret that cloud technology providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure have fundamentally changed information technology and how we build digital services. The first benefit of the cloud most cloud practitioners recognize is that with cloud services, organizations can significantly reduce their hardware infrastructure stacks, meaning they no longer need to build and maintain data centers to support their information systems.

The cloud gives organizations access to virtually unlimited compute power and network resources without purchasing hardware. This concept fosters a culture of innovation. Have you been excited to try a new technology or build your own solution to determine the financial risk is too high to justify pursuing a Proof of Concept (PoC)? To build an experiment, you may need to purchase servers, storage devices, load balancers, firewalls, etc. This could easily require an up-front investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then what happens when your PoC fails? You will most likely have thousands of dollars in sunk costs and unused hardware. Not only does this impact the bottom-line budget, but it also carries reputational risk for the technology practitioners and leaders. This is where you will begin to see significant cloud benefits. Cloud technologies allow organizations to fail fast and fail often without a substantial financial burden. The versatility of the cloud will enable organizations to provision on-demand technology stacks without purchasing the supporting infrastructure. Imagine how much faster you could build a PoC without the need and risk of procuring hardware. Best of all, if your PoC fails, simply turn off the cloud services you are using and you just saved thousands of dollars. Cloud technologies essentially eliminate the financial risk associated with innovation.

As great as being able to “rent” services from cloud providers is, it is just one of the reasons for the paradigm shift. Another significant factor of the cloud being a digital disrupter is the way the cloud is teaching us to build information systems and services. Microsoft Azure’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Mark Russinovich, says, “We are in the midst of an application development and IT system management revolution driven by the cloud.” [2]. According to Russinovich, competitive business pressures require organizations to evolve by adding feature-rich functionality and maintaining a 24×7 service availability. He provides an example of the expectation of services such as online banking and retail shopping to be available around the clock without interruption. As a technology leader in the banking industry, I can attest to Russinovich’s claim and double down on the concept by saying that customers are not the only ones with these expectations. Organizations now share the same values. While public-facing services such as online banking may be the face of an organization, the resiliency of back-end systems is just as important. Imagine a bank’s fraud detection system. If it becomes unavailable for a couple of hours, a bank may be exposed to thousands of dollars lost due to fraud.

The cloud answers the call to design and build resilient systems. The way the cloud teaches practitioners to build solutions is a major secondary effect of cloud digital disruption. The past’s monolithic application and infrastructure designs have created tightly coupled digital services with numerous dependencies, where the failure of a single system component is likely to begin a domino effect. This is where microservices come to the rescue.

“A microservices application is decomposed into independent components called ‘microservices,’ that work in concert to deliver the application’s overall functionality. The term ‘microservice’ emphasizes the fact that applications should be composed of services small enough to truly reflect independent concerns such that each microservice implements a single function.”, says Russinovich [2]. The loose coupling described by Russinovich supports the rapid and reliable evolution of digital service and makes services more resilient. The failure of a single microservice doesn’t bring an entire service to its knees, avoiding the domino effect.

In addition to unlimited disposable compute power and loosely coupled application architectures, the cloud encourages us to rethink the entire application design architecture. To stimulate your thinking, cloud platform providers, such as AWS, offer tools such as the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help organizations understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems [3]. The Well-Architected Framework is built upon six pillars (1) Operational Excellence, (2) Security, (3) Reliability, (4) Performance Efficiency, (5) Cost Optimization, and (6) Sustainability [3]. To help organizations better utilize the framework, AWS created the Well-Architected Review (WAR). The WAR process guides practitioners through a series of questions related to the six pillars mentioned above.

A major secondary effect of the cloud is the adoption of Agile and DevOps methodologies by organizations that are traditionally waterfall based. While these methodologies and the cloud are not mutually exclusive, the nature of operating in the cloud typically accelerates the adoption of these methodologies.

The bread and butter of the cloud is the ability to build scalable services faster and more affordably than ever before. Dr. Sanjay Rishi, CEO of JLL Work Dynamics – Americas, also believes cloud architectures have enabled organizations to enable new operating models that can respond at the speed of today’s business challenges [4].

In summary, the cloud is the source of a major digital disruption with several significant secondary effects. The effects of this disruption not only impact the Information Technology industry but nearly every industry in some shape or form.

Figure 1: Predictive Digital Disruption Scale [5].

References

[1] T. Arduini, “To Disrupt or Not to Disrupt?,” 29 August 2022. [Online]. Available: https://sites.psu.edu/aja6921/2022/08/29/to-disrupt-or-not-to-disrupt/. [Accessed 30 August 2022].

[2] M. Russinovich, “Microservices: an application revolution powered by the cloud,” 17 March 2016. [Online]. Available: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microservices-an-application-revolution-powered-by-the-cloud/. [Accessed 30 August 2022].

[3] Amazon Web Services, “AWS Well-Architected Framework,” Amazon Web Services, [Online]. Available: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework/the-pillars-of-the-framework.html. [Accessed 30 August 2022].

[4] S. Rishi, “How cloud is driving digital disruption across industries,” LinkedIn, 4 October 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-cloud-driving-digital-disruption-across-industries-rishi/. [Accessed 30 August 2022].

[5] D. Smith and D. Plummer, “Measuring the impacts of digital disruption: populating Gartner’s Digital Disruption Scale,” 11 April 2018.