Legacy system modernization with DevOps

DevOps, a practice which blends software development and IT operations, unifies, and automates key processes to help shorten development lifecycles, improve product quality, and support continuous updates and delivery. With that in mind, let’s look at how DevOps can be used to streamline app modernization projects.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic shifted technology priorities overnight, requiring unique infrastructure and security to support companies unexpectedly forced to move to a remote work model. According to a study by AppDynamics, 81% of IT professionals reported that the pandemic has created the biggest technology pressure for their organizations than ever before. And because of the dramatic increase in remote workers since March of 2020, 88% of IT professionals say that their new priority is creating and managing the digital customer experience.

To create a high level of excellence in the digital customer experience, many organizations began advancing app development methodologies to provide the access, tools, and services to remote workers. Feeling the pressure to develop, modernize, and distribute apps quickly, more and more IT teams implemented DevOps to streamline processes.

Modernizing legacy systems and apps: Can DevOps help get it done right?

DevOps is not just a methodology, it’s a culture and philosophical approach to software development that standardizes continuous development and continuous delivery, rather than following traditional software development life cycle (SDLC) practices. To understand this, let’s consider three important things that matter the most in any organization: People, processes, and tools.

• People:People plan, design, and implement strategies to help organizations achieve specific goals. With legacy systems, traditional workflow and outdated skills can be barriers to growth, competitive advantage, and more. People who lack a visionary approach and clear strategy are often a major setback to development.
  • How DevOps helps: DevOps helps businesses overcome modern challenges in an agile and efficient manner, based on a continuous cycle of improvements. In terms of modernization, DevOps helps unite people under a shared vision requiring everyone’s participation.

    A change in a system process requires flexibility to adapt to cultural shifts. DevOps help organizations establish a people-first culture and bridges the gap between development and operations teams.

• Modernization of systems requires moving from traditional and manual processes to smarter, automated, and more intuitive processes. Code must be re-tooled, and can result in delayed timelines, slower response times, and disturbed workflows. Fast decisions are important to avoid delayed time-to-market, and even a small enhancement requires a quick decision.

  DevOps mandates continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices in companies that follow DevOps principles. Focusing on automation and iteration, CI/CD helps streamline the code pipeline and speed delivery. Moving code to the central repository and frequently committing changes in the code result in continuous build and integration.

  • How DevOps helps: DevOps supports process improvement in a number of ways. It converts monolithic services into smaller and more independently-deployable microservices. It also improves performance and availability through the use of better cloud technologies.

    Using DevOps makes is easier to implement automation practices like continuous integration, testing, and deployment, and it supports the use of concepts like container orchestration to automate deployment, management, configuration, and scaling.

    By providing early feedback, continuous monitoring, and analysis, DevOps facilitates continuous improvement throughout the development process. DevOps encourages smaller, continuous, and faster changes, enabling faster response time and more satisfied customers.

• Majority legacy systems lack coordination between teams. Manual deployment, testing, and configuration management can take hours, days—and sometimes, months. There is no automation, and decentralized environments multiple dependencies that must line up to get the job finished.

  DevOps makes things easier for the development and operation environment by introducing easy-to-use, centralized-yet-independent, and advances chains of tools. These tools enable developers to build, test, and deploy frequently with the help of automation and integration.

  Tools play an important role in the modernization journey. The underlying technology stack should be stable, agile, secure, and flexible.

  Modernization is not only part of a great app UI/UX; it’s also an integral part of digital transformation. It’s about customers, employees, partners, and everyone who is associated with your business.

• How DevOps helps: DevOps is essential to the modernization of tools in four ways:

  Automation: Going from manual to automated processes is one of the prime goals of modernization. Automated tools and technology reduce time and cost, and also help achieve higher efficiency and better performance.

  Integration: Integration is one of the most important practices of DevOps. Whether it is code, people, or processes, everything represents tight integration across the application lifecycle to develop and deploy software at high velocity.

  Transformation: DevOps is not just a tool or a method; it represents enormous cultural changes across the teams, skills, and mindsets. Rather than working on a system as a whole, with DevOps, teams must develop small, independent, and easily-deployable units.

  Optimization: DevOps ensures that software development architecture can withstand any situation, whether it’s supporting a high load of concurrent users, or uploading a minor change in the system. With DevOps, an organization can better optimize its resources and skills to develop high-quality software faster and more cost-effectively.

  DevOps provides collaboration and connectivity between teams to establish a faster feedback cycle, increasing the speed of deployment and reliability while reducing many of the business risks.

According to a 2020 survey by Insight, companies pursuing IT modernization state that the approach has helped them achieve most of their initial objectives, and has demonstrated measurable improvement in five core areas:

• Quality of service – 70%
• Cost efficiency/savings – 60%
• Innovation/new revenue streams – 58%
• Customer experience/satisfaction – 56%
• Availability/uptime – 54%

Modernization with the cloud, microservices, and DevOps

The combination of the cloud, microservices, and DevOps is fast becoming a best practice for IT modernization projects today. Investing in the right tools and skills helps organizations design effective continuous modernization strategies that result in stronger revenue, a better customer experience, and a bigger competitive edge.

If you are considering IT modernization, Pegasus One can help. Talk to our experts and get a better understanding of how we can help you on your modernization journey.