The Role of DevOps in Application Modernization
March 06, 2024

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri
Cigniti Technologies

Competitive differentiation keeps business enterprises agile, trendy, competitive, and user-friendly. Legacy applications do not quite fit into driving modern digital transformation. This is because they do not lend themselves to being adaptable or compatible with the latest systems, frameworks, or platforms. A robust application modernization strategy can help transform a business's legacy applications using modern technologies and architectures. Using cloud-based services like serverless computing, microservices, containers, and other DevOps methodologies may then be made possible by such systems.


In today's fast-paced digital environment, businesses always try to stay ahead of the curve. Modernizing applications is one of the key strategies businesses employ to achieve this. The process involves updating, enhancing, and optimizing existing applications to meet business needs. DevOps plays a pivotal role in this modernization journey, often centered on digital product engineering. It acts as the catalyst that ensures seamless, efficient, and collaborative development and deployment processes. Statistically, the market value of application modernization stood at $15.2 billion in 2022. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.7 percent to reach $32.8 billion by 2027 (source: marketsandmarkets).

DevOps acts as an enabler when taking an application modernization approach. It empowers teams to collaborate efficiently, respond to changing requirements swiftly, and deliver modernized applications that meet the demands of today's users. As businesses evolve, embracing DevOps principles will be the cornerstone of their successful application modernization journey. These will ensure their software remains robust, secure, and user-friendly in the face of technological advancements and market demands. This blog explores the role of DevOps in application modernization. However, let us first understand why application modernization is needed.

The Need for Application Modernization

It is essential for business enterprises to align with market demands, given the pace at which requirements change. A legacy application can stifle the growth of a business enterprise. The business enterprise, on its part, often faces a slew of challenges when it comes to modernizing a legacy application.

■ Legacy applications made of monilithic architecture are difficult to update.

■ Legacy applications demand a lot of investment and effort to upgrade.

■ Legacy applications contain several security risks and vulnerabilities.

■ Legacy applications come in the way of organizational agility.

How DevOps Accelerates the Pace of Application Modernization

DevOps methodology streamlines development and operations processes and helps them collaborate to generate better business outcomes. The various ways it accelerates the pace of application modernization are mentioned below:

1. Agile Development and Collaboration: DevOps practices promote agile development methodologies, breaking down traditional silos between development and operations teams. DevOps ensures that every stage of the application modernization process remains streamlined and efficient by fostering collaboration, communication, and integration among these teams. Developers and operations personnel work hand in hand, leading to faster feedback loops, quicker issue resolution, and accelerated development cycles.

2. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): These pipelines are at the core of DevOps practices. They allow automated code integration, testing, and deployment, ensuring that changes are rapidly implemented, and issues are identified early in development. In application modernization, CI/CD pipelines facilitate the seamless integration of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes into existing applications. This results in a continuous delivery model where updates are rolled out in smaller increments, reducing risks and enhancing the user experience.

3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Modern applications rely on complex and dynamic infrastructure. IaC, a core DevOps principle, allows infrastructure provisioning and management through code. This approach ensures consistency across environments, enabling development and operations teams to collaborate effectively. In the context of application modernization, IaC provides the flexibility to create, modify, and scale infrastructure components as needed, aligning the application with evolving business requirements.

4. Monitoring and Feedback Loops: DevOps practices emphasize continuous monitoring and feedback loops, enabling teams to detect issues, gather performance insights, and analyze user behavior. By leveraging product engineering services(link is external), businesses can assess the impact of modernization efforts on application performance and user satisfaction. Real-time feedback allows teams to make data-driven decisions, prioritize enhancements, and refine the modernization process iteratively.

5. Security Integration: Security is paramount in modern application development. DevOps practices incorporate security measures throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring that security is not a bottleneck but an integral part of the process. By integrating security checks, vulnerability assessments, and compliance audits into CI/CD pipelines, DevOps teams can identify and address security issues early, safeguarding the modernized applications and the sensitive data they handle.

Conclusion

In the digital transformation era, enterprise application modernization is not just a choice but a necessity for businesses aiming to stay competitive. DevOps practices provide the essential framework and tools to drive successful modernization initiatives. By embracing agile methodologies and a host of other measures, businesses or application modernization services(link is external) can confidently navigate the complex landscape of application modernization.

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri is Manager, Marketing, at Cigniti Technologies
Share this

Industry News

February 20, 2025

GitLab announced the general availability of GitLab Duo Self-Hosted.

February 20, 2025

Tigera announced the introduction of several new innovations to Calico, including a new Ingress Gateway capability for Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise, and the launch of Calico Dashboards.

February 20, 2025

Copado introduced three AI-powered DevOps apps for Slack.

February 20, 2025

Gearset announced that it now supports Salesforce's Agentforce.

February 19, 2025

Sonar announced the acquisition of AutoCodeRover, an autonomous AI agent platform for software development.

February 19, 2025

Faros AI announced a collaboration with Microsoft to deliver its AI-powered platform for optimizing engineering workflows on Azure.

February 19, 2025

Apollo GraphQL announced the general availability of Apollo Connectors for REST APIs and new GraphOS platform enhancements — giving enterprises a faster, more efficient way to execute their API strategies.

February 18, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Check Point CloudGuard solution has been recognized as a Leader across three key GigaOm Radar reports: Application & API Security, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Workload Security.

February 13, 2025

LaunchDarkly announced the private preview of Warehouse Native Experimentation, its Snowflake Native App, to offer Data Warehouse Native Experimentation.

February 13, 2025

SingleStore announced the launch of SingleStore Flow, a no-code solution designed to greatly simplify data migration and Change Data Capture (CDC).

February 13, 2025

ActiveState launched its Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaas) offering to help organizations manage open source and accelerate secure software delivery.

February 12, 2025

Genkit for Node.js is now at version 1.0 and ready for production use.

February 12, 2025

JFrog signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

February 12, 2025

mabl launched of two new innovations, mabl Tools for Playwright and mabl GenAI Test Creation, expanding testing capabilities beyond the bounds of traditional QA teams.

February 11, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced a strategic partnership with leading cloud security provider Wiz to address the growing challenges enterprises face securing hybrid cloud environments.