MongoDB today unveiled an application modernization platform that makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to analyze and convert legacy applications into code that can be used to deploy a modern application on its document database.
Shilpa Kolhar, senior vice president of product and engineering for MongoDB, said the MongoDB Application Modernization Platform (AMP) will make it possible to refactor code in a way that is compatible with the open source Java Spring framework, which in turn could then be deployed on MongoDB.
The overall goal with the help of a MongoDB consulting team is to accelerate the pace at which an application modernization project could be completed by a factor of two to three times, she added. Early adopters of MongoDB AMP include Bendigo Bank, Lombard Odier and IntellectAI.
MongoDB has gained significant traction in recent years as a platform for deploying modern greenfield application, but with the rise of AI, the time and effort required to refactor legacy applications is dropping. The challenge, of course, is that refactoring legacy applications has typically required months, sometimes even years, of effort usually involving expensive professional services organizations.
However, AI agents are now making it simpler to analyze and convert code in ways that promise to sharply reduce the amount of time that historically has been required to complete an application modernization initiative. DevOps teams should still review that code before it is deployed in a production environment, but the overall amount of effort required should be considerably reduced.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are looking to modernize legacy applications but each IT platform they need to support increases total costs. The challenge has been that migrating an application from one database to another has been especially difficult. While AI agents are not going to automate that entire process, they should reduce a lot of the tedious effort currently required.
Of course, MongoDB will not be the only provider of an IT platform that is employing AI agents to help organizations migrate legacy applications to a modern platform that is less expensive to deploy and maintain. In fact, in the age of agentic AI it is now only a matter of time before the cost of switching from one IT platform to another declines to the point where the ability to reverse engineering code advances to a level where it becomes difficult to lock any organization into a particular platform. As a result, DevOps teams might want to start identifying applications that they now want to modernize that previously would have simply been too complex an undertaking to attempt.
In fact, the impact of AI is likely to be way beyond simply making it possible to write new application code faster, but also address a lot of the technical debt created by legacy applications that no one today knows for sure how they were actually built in the first place.
