A Guide to Sustainable Application Modernization

Sustainable development is a blueprint for societal growth that is applied around the world to balance the needs of the present while optimizing for the future. Sustainability consists of three pillars — economic, environmental and social — that must work together to meet this goal. The complexities of digital transformation and application modernization can benefit from applying a sustainability lens to this challenge that not only includes the technical benefits of cloud computing but, more broadly, the three P’s of sustainability: Profit, people and planet. Application modernization will benefit the business in measurable ways, but can also affect unexpected positive cultural and green initiative benefits.

Sustainable Application Modernization: What is it?

Sustainability initiatives have always had to take a holistic approach that combines human, ecological and economic health and vitality. Sustainable application modernization is no different in that business leaders are dealing with finite resources (budget, staff and time) that must be applied now to align with longer-term priorities and their associated consequences. The main goal of application modernization is to transform an enterprise’s monolithic applications into modern architectures that can more fully take advantage of cloud-native services such as containers, microservices, serverless and a range of DevOps methodologies. These technical capabilities lead to a number of high-value cloud benefits including scalability, elasticity and engineering agility. Too many modernization strategies and business plans stop there and this is a mistake. By undervaluing the sustainability benefits that include economic, environmental and people upsides, technology business leaders are not accounting for some of the most important benefits of modernization.

Breaking down the modernization problem along the three pillars of sustainability helps define sustainable application modernization:

• Economic sustainability: The business benefits of modernization must account for releasing more features and fixes more frequently, less downtime, lower technical debt and higher rates of innovation.

• Environmental sustainability: A modern architecture is more resource efficient, scales at a much finer level than a monolith, and is able to take advantage of cloud data centers that offer the “greater efficiency of aggregated compute resources.” These cloud-native architectures enable more intelligent application orchestration and resource allocation usage based on demand, need, cost, seasonality and performance.

• Social sustainability: Besides the ongoing challenge of recruiting and retaining talent for maintaining a monolith, the resulting development team structure is a direct reflection of the architecture itself and this is most often monolithic, too. A more domain-centric approach using modern technologies creates leaner, more focused team topologies that can also operate effectively in remote work structures.

The broader benefits and impacts of effective application modernization align directly to metrics associated with elite performers in DevOps research reports that track four key performance categories: Frequency of application deployments, application feature lead time, change failure rates and time to recovery. This long-standing and annual research report from DevOps research and assessment (DORA) metrics also now reaches beyond the business and technical dimensions into the performance, culture, people, burnout and team impacts of these modern best practices.

Application Modernization is Not Just an IT Problem

Most application modernization projects never fully get off the ground because technology leaders look at modernization as just an IT problem. The business cases for these projects focus on technical benefits or simple cloud migration and lift-and-shift infrastructure cost improvements. A sustainable application development methodology opens up this calculus to the three dimensions of sustainability: Economic, environmental and social.

Much as everyone from developing countries to the richest nations in the world view sustainability initiatives along these lines—balancing economic growth, environmental health and the vitality of their citizenship—application modernization projects can be a catalyst to major improvements that drive profit, maximize efficiency while improving company culture, retention and team growth.

Sustainable Application Modernization: Three Steps to Get Started

The enthusiasm for application modernization is high, but organizational precendent and a history of failed efforts stop most projects before they get started. These three steps can set you on a sustainable path going forward.

• Start with a data-driven plan: A monolithic application architecture requires a quantitative understanding of the technical debt you are carrying at an architectural level; the move to a cloud-native architecture unlocks the business, environmental, and cultural benefits discussed above. Thus, it’s critical to assess your application estate from an architectural perspective to calculate the complexity and risk associated with your applications, prioritize which applications to modernize and extract ROI benefits related to the modernization effort.
• Build a broad coalition across the pillars: A sustainable application modernization plan works across three pillars that span different roles, functions, and initiatives in an organization. This strategy creates both an opportunity and a need to recruit outside the technology team to the business and product owners that can validate and then promote the economic upside. Next, pull in green initiatives and corporate sustainability representation that can quantify and promote the environmental benefits further. Finally, HR, training and project management experts will understand and align with the people-side of modernization to create more agile, happier and efficient teams.
• Create a continuous modernization culture: This approach is designed to maximize short-term benefits while optimizing for the future. It’s critical to look at this as an ongoing, continuous best practice that becomes ingrained at both a technical and cultural level. Most modernization strategies have resulted in one-off projects that, even if completed, may quickly devolve back to bloated monoliths due to a lack of cultural and organizational commitment to take these practices forward and iterate across all applications in the future.

Sustainable application modernization methodologies can change the course of application development inside an organization and provide a catalyst toward a thriving future that pushes the technology forward and can maximize the value to the business, environment and company culture.