The Best Way to Modernize Your Applications

[Emily Clarke]

Just because a software application has aged doesn’t mean that it has outlived its usefulness. In fact, many early software applications that were used to build the modern Internet and the world’s digital commerce environment are still viable today with a little bit of modernization.

Application modernization can be challenging, however, as many aging applications have been built on monolithic infrastructure systems that were never designed to adapt quickly. While application modernization is not impossible in the face of such challenges, the process of modernizing can be painfully slow and often requires a lot of resource investment. For more information about application modernization, check out this website.

Taking Things Apart

One approach to modernization is to take existing infrastructure systems and break them apart. This process of modular deconstruction allows you to separate the various functions of singular elements. You aren’t breaking apart the code. Instead, you are taking the chunks that make up the different functions and separating them onto their own islands.

From there, individual encapsulations can be built for different functions to be distributed onto. The goal here is to have the ability to move different functions of a total piece of software onto their own modules without needing to change a lot of code.

Remove Context to Build Context

Another consideration is to remove context to boil software products down to their core components. When you create a software product that is released in various environments, there are bound to be changes that are specific to each environment. Basically, you end up creating different versions of the product for different user bases.

If you can strip out the context and break everything in the code down to its core functionality, you can then use this core to build onto the modules you created when separating from infrastructure. In a sense, you can swap code in and out of modules at will, making the process of modernization fast and effective when faced with rapid changes in need. This can also serve to future-proof your product as it will be ready for modernization processes that need to be undertaken down the road.

Read a similar article about infrastructure migration best practices here at this page.