Thank you for reading my last blog on how to modernize age-old applications using automation. Let’s take a closer look at the available automated tools and explore the insights they extract to speed up app modernization.

Assessment and Analysis

The automation tool for application assessment should:

• Assess applications across the maximum landscape within an enterprise (Windows, Linux, AIX)
• Map dependencies/interdependencies of and between applications and databases (like an X-ray or CT-Scan of the eco-system)
• Provide inputs down the applications and its processes and config files
• Provide recommendations across 6Rs
• Cost less and reduce time to assess and analyze apps
• Create reports for CXO and practitioners

There are free tools provided by cloud service providers, however, they focus more on infra (VMs and Bare Metal) and don’t focus on applications and databases (aspects mentioned above). Also, some are more tuned towards specific cloud service providers or platforms. Enterprises need a platform-agnostic assessment that will enable them to choose the best possible platform for their application workloads.

Buy-in of the App Owner

The assessment report(s) needs to be discussed with application owner(s), at the end of the day they know or need to know:

• The objective of getting cost savings, agility, scalability, and innovation
• Broader business strategy and the journey forward
• Current team, their skills, and limitations and how will they contribute during the modernization process

Application owners are bound to be focused on how a certain application will give them maximum RoI with the least possible TCO. For e.g. if agility and scalability are current challenges and application modernization addresses these challenges only then the budget will get approved.

Inputs from Practitioners

Technology practitioners need to arm the application owner with much in-depth analysis of the application, perhaps down to every process of an application and how will it be modernized and its benefits. Following is a snippet of a report for containerizing an application’s process. This kind of report has to be generated by an automation tool.

Action Plan Per Application

With buy-in from every application/business owner to modernize or not to modernize an application, the decision tree may look like the following:

In order to assess and analyze applications to arrive at such kind of report. CloudHedge Discover needs access to the VM or bare metal server on which the application and its ecosystem are deployed. It can discover 100 applications in 4 weeks with all the necessary details and recommendation reports.

Next article, we discuss how to automate the containerization of applications and/or it’s processes, stay tuned!