Many companies have accelerated their modernization plans in order to meet the new demands of conducting business in a digital-only or primarily digital environment. A recent survey released by Maria DB in partnership with Propeller Insights found that 40% of businesses are accelerating cloud adoption plans, and business leaders expect a long-term benefit from the technology agility and new ways of working.

“Since legacy applications are often the bottleneck for such transformations, legacy modernization is now more critical than ever,” writes Jason Bloomberg, president of Intellyx, in his recent article Digital Transformation and Application Modernization in Time of Crisis.

“Modernizing certain functionality is always more urgent than the rest. True, it will eventually be important to modernize most or all of the legacy application functionality, but today the focus is on what’s most important,” Bloomberg continues.

No Longer a Pipe Dream: Automated Microservices Extraction from the Monolith

The historical criticism of a microservices approach to modernizing monolithic applications has been driven by the human ability to understand (or not) the architecture and programming of the monolith itself. If the intellectual capital that developed the application left the company and/or the documentation was weak, then trying to develop properly architected microservices to replace functionality was wrought with issues. When trying to wrap a monolith with microservices, the defects of the legacy architecture translated through to the microservices layer. A microservices approach to replacing the monolith was a mere pipe dream.

Thanks to Synchrony Systems’ innovative engineering and deep domain expertise in the migration automation field, new modernization technology is available that can identify and extract full execution paths of critical business functions and automatically migrate them to the desired target platform as microservices. These microservices have a modern architecture which makes them suitable to be deployed immediately to the cloud and to platforms such as Kubernetes. The microservices extraction technology preserves 100% of the functional equivalence of the legacy functionality, ensuring existing operational processes remain intact postmodernization.

Along with the narrow, vertical fully executable functionality, the microservices extraction technology can also accurately identify candidate “dead” code that can be removed altogether. This reduces technical debt and total cost of ownership by deprecating functionality that no longer matters, and therefore, should not be modernized.

No longer is it necessary to modernize the entire application. Automatic microservices extraction technology gives businesses the ability to rapidly modernize only the code that matters and addresses urgent business needs today.

The Benefits of Microservices Can Finally Be Achieved During Application Modernization

This microservices extraction technology makes it possible to modernize monolithic legacy applications and realize the long-sought benefits of microservices architecture. These benefits include:

• Speed—migrate key business functions to the target platform in months, not years.

• Agility—deliver incremental, modern microservices aligned with your DevOps practices.

• Flexibility—transform business-critical functionality driven by business priorities.

• Scalability—deploy truly scalable microservices and without the bottleneck of the legacy monolith.

• Savings—reduce technical debt, the total cost of ownership and the upfront spend on the modernization.

Companies will also benefit from the new services model for modernizations, Modernization-as-a-Service (MaaS), that microservices extraction capabilities enable. Modernizations now can be planned, budgeted, and executed incrementally over time instead of an all-or-nothing approach.

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