Modernizing Applications with Azure PaaS

,

Modernizing-_Applications_with_Azure_PaaS-2 Modernizing Applications with Azure PaaSFor organizations that rely on legacy technology, the cost of maintaining outdated software inhibits innovation and slows down the digital transformation process. Since business operations generate dependency on these legacy systems while accumulating enormous data over the years, such systems are hard to scale and complex to replace.

Migrating their legacy applications to an efficient technology ecosystem, organizations undertake app modernization as one of the key stages of their digital transformation journey. With modernization, organizations embrace efficient technology, tools and approaches, including Cloud, DevOps, and Microservices. These collectively enable organizations to become more lean, agile, and adaptable. 

A common approach to app modernization is transitioning the legacy application off the on-prem servers and rehosting/re-platforming it to a cloud platform. A Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform is one such cloud-based model that allows organizations to benefit from a pre-configured platform of essential infrastructure resources. 

In this article, we dive into the use-cases of a PaaS model, and the benefits of modernizing applications with Azure PaaS.

Modernizing Legacy Apps With Azure PaaS

A legacy on-prem framework requires enormous efforts towards provisioning and ongoing maintenance of the underlying infrastructure. In addition to this, managing a platform in-house gets immensely complex with frequent changes in compliance policies and security landscape. For mission-critical applications, ensuring a load-balanced service with distributed traffic additionally requires niche skills as well as considerable financial commitments. 

To help with this, Microsoft offers an HTTP-based Azure PaaS Service (commonly referred to as App Service) for hosting web applications, REST APIs, and mobile application backends on Windows or Linux-based environments.

With App Service, there are no administrative efforts to maintain the base infrastructure where the applications run. This provides an efficient approach to deploy an application on the cloud without worrying about provisioning, configuring, or scaling the platform. 

Azure uses an efficient Service Fabric to ensure that each application in the plan keeps running and that resources can be scaled up or down as needed. Each App Service runs on a virtual machine in a Microsoft Datacenter. By allowing users to easily set the maximum instances of VMs on which they want to run their applications, the Service Fabric then replicates the application across multiple VMs, keeps them running, and balances load across them.

Some features of Azure App Service include:

  • Support for Multiple Programming Languages and Frameworks: Organizations can deploy applications built on a wide variety of frameworks, including .Net Core, NodeJS, Java, PHP, Python, or Ruby. Azure App Service also supports Powershell and other executable scripts as background services.
  • Serverless Code Using Azure Functions: Rather than deploying applications that explicitly require extensive provisioning or management of infrastructure, organizations can run serverless code snippets at a fraction of the compute time cost.
  • App Containerization: Organizations can deploy applications in containers and leverage efficient architectures such as Microservices for enhanced scalability and performance.
  • DevOps Support: Azure allows to set up testing, staging, and production environments with continuous integration and deployment pipelines in line with DevOps practices.
  • Provides CORS support for APIs. Also supports secured authentication, push notification, and offline data sync for mobile apps.
  • In-App SQL databases for storing app data.

Benefits of Azure App Service 

Organizations can benefit from modernizing applications with Azure PaaS in the following ways:

  • High Scalability: Azure allows organizations to scale their applications up or out. With the easy to use Azure Portal, users can set up auto-scale settings based on CPU, memory, and disk utilization levels to support additional application load or stress. Additionally, the Per-App scaling feature allows organizations to allocate and set resources for mission-critical applications selectively. 
  • High Availability: Azure’s App Service SLAs guarantee high availability using the optimum resources. This benefits an organization by leveraging the ability to host its applications across multiple regions through Microsoft’s extensive global datacenter infrastructure.
  • Analytics and Actionable Insights: The Azure portal provides insightful analytics on an application’s health and performance levels. Organizations can also obtain details on the app’s response times, CPU, memory, and disk utilization levels for identifying incident root cause or performance optimization. 
  • Robust Security: App Service provides authentication support through Azure Active Directory, Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Microsoft accounts. Additionally, organizations can control network access of their apps by setting up a priority list of deny/allow IP addresses while benefitting from Azure Virtual Network subnets.
  • Multi-Platform Support: App Service supports different languages and frameworks for app development and deployment, thus allowing for various industry and application-type use cases.

Popular PaaS Use-Cases 

While there are numerous successful use-cases of the PaaS model, the following are some of the most common domains that benefit from it:

  • Datawarehouse/Business Intelligence

Using cloud-based PaaS offerings, organizations can locate insights, generate patterns and predict results to improve business decisions such as forecasting, product design, and investment profits. Due to a number of PaaS-enabled benefits, more and more organizations securely set up and manage data storage such as databases, data warehouses, and data lakes using popular PaaS platforms such as Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

  • Application Hosting

A PaaS model is often considered as an enabler to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. As a result, for businesses that offer SaaS-based application offerings, PaaS offers an immediate, quick to launch platform of cloud services to deploy, host, run and manage cloud-based applications, APIs, and mobile backends.

  • IoT

The versatility provided by PaaS platforms shown in the range of languages, frameworks, and tools supported allows for IoT deployments and integrations. By supporting to efficiently deploy applications on the edge, organizations can benefit from modernizing applications with Azure PaaS, focusing on an IoT framework.

Summary 

Legacy applications are usually monolithic, expensive to manage and difficult to scale. Outdated software makes it challenging to adapt to new business requirements and hinders an organization’s digital transformation. Adopting a pragmatic approach to app modernization using PaaS platforms provides ways for organizations to refactor these applications for high efficiency. It also helps organizations to take advantage of cloud benefits like economies of scale and scalability.

Azure’s App Service by Microsoft is a cloud-based PaaS offering that provides a fully managed platform that offers auto-scaling, in-app SQL databases, high availability, and robust security to modernize and deploy modern applications. With a growing pattern of emerging technologies such as IoT, Stateful Applications, and Event Stream Processing, the computing paradigm is now at a completely different level than it used to be. This is why it’s critical for businesses to focus on the core application development and its growth, rather than spending efforts on redundant tasks of managing underlying platforms. 

 

To know more about how Optimus can help you migrate your legacy apps to a PaaS model, contact us today.

/by

Common Cloud Adoption Missteps during the Strategy and Planning Phase

Common_Cloud_Adoption_Missteps_2-1 Common Cloud Adoption Missteps during the Strategy and Planning Phase

 

There are many roadblocks along your journey to digital transformation. Following the guidance from the Cloud Adoption Framework closely is essential when undergoing your cloud migration.  While the Cloud Adoption Framework helps make cloud adoption easier, there are still several missteps that can lead you astray. In this article, we’ll briefly review the Cloud Adoption Framework, the main missteps made during the strategy and planning phases, and we’ll also provide some quick remedies to easily avoid these mistakes. 

 

A Review of The Cloud Adoption Framework

Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure was developed as the One Microsoft cloud adoption approach. It consolidates advice and guidelines from Microsoft professionals and customers throughout the industry into one best practices guide. It shares the full lifecycle framework with detailed tips and information. If you want to learn more about the Cloud Adoption Framework, check out our previous article on the topic here.

In this article, we’ll be going over cloud adoption antipatterns. Antipatterns are missteps that occur during the cloud adoption process, usually in the design, planning, or implementation stages. They are often blockers that prevent organizations from reaching goals and achieving innovation. Next, we’ll cover common cloud adoption missteps that occur in the planning and strategy phases and how to avoid them. 

caf-diagram Common Cloud Adoption Missteps during the Strategy and Planning Phase

Cloud Adoption Framework diagram provided by Microsoft.

Common Cloud Adoption Missteps During the Strategy Phase

The strategy phase of the Cloud Adoption Framework looks at documenting business strategies and outcomes from your organization so that key stakeholders and your team members have a clearer picture of what’s going on. Two main antipatterns can take place during this stage of cloud adoption: inadequate motivation and misaligned motivation.

Inadequate Motivation

When an organization adopts the cloud without clear or well-defined goals in mind beforehand, many issues often follow. It’s hard to measure project performance without predetermined indicators of success. If a company announces cloud-led strategies without thinking through what that actually entails, it doesn’t truly give them the benefits of cloud adoption.

Organizations can avoid this simple mistake by defining their goals and KPIs before embarking on their cloud adoption journey. In doing this, measures of success become more clear and project success also becomes replicable.

Misaligned Motivation

Sometimes cloud adoption plans can fail when motivations are misaligned or not properly communicated within a company. For example, if a business sees a benefit in a specific cloud adoption strategy but does not share that with the rest of the organization, other departments have a more difficult time onboarding these strategies and implementing them.

This issue can be mitigated by clearly outlining and sharing reasons for specific cloud adoption strategies with the entire company. It creates a cohesive environment within the organization that allows for those strategies to be built upon successfully and with ease. 

Common Cloud Adoption Missteps During the Planning Phase

The planning phase of the Cloud Adoption Framework looks at taking the goals formulated during the strategy phase and turning them into a tangible plan. This cloud adoption plan can then guide teams to stick to the strategies they came up with previously, as well as helps to prioritize cloud adoption motivations. There are three main antipatterns that often take place during this stage: wrong operating model, wrong service model, and replacement instead of modernization.

Wrong Operating Model

In choosing the wrong operating model issues such as misunderstandings, extra pressures on the IT department, and more can ensue. This is due in part to the fact that the operating model is not lining up with the company’s priorities and goals as defined in the strategy stage. 

One way to mitigate this issue is by comparing models with your current operating plan before switching over. By analyzing the pros and cons of each model and weighing the benefits, it will be much easier to find the right fit. To learn more about comparing cloud operation models, read this guide from Microsoft.

Wrong Service Model

It’s important to properly look at and understand the differences between a PaaS and IaaS service model. Some may assume that a PaaS service model is more cost-efficient but that’s not always the case, and making this assumption can sometimes lead to product delivery delays, unexpected cost increases, and more. 

The best way to avoid this issue is to minimize disruption to your business at the beginning of the cloud adoption process. Using IaaS and gradually adopting a PaaS model will allow for less disruption and will also give your team some time to gain cloud adoption skills.

Replacement Instead of Modernization

Replacing large and complex products or application environments is a decision that shouldn’t be made lightly. Yes, it’s true that working in old, complex architecture landscapes is far from ideal and can lead to delays and issues. But completely replacing these systems is often very costly and involves many risks. 

Instead, looking at modernization as an option is a better alternative. Small, persistent changes to your systems can often have a bigger and safer impact than completely switching your software. As well as this, it’s often quicker and usually much cost-efficient. 

 

What’s Next?

This blog article is the first of a four-part series focussing on common cloud adoption missteps. Follow along with us to learn about some common errors in the next stages of the cloud adoption framework. 

 

 

Many organizations find it beneficial to work with a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) when undergoing cloud adoption. Read our article on the benefits of using a CSP here. 

If you’re interested in having Optimus as your CSP, you can reach us at this email: info@optimusinfo.com

/by

Optimus has Earned the Modernization of Web Apps to Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization

Optimus_Adv_Specializationi_banner-scaled Optimus has Earned the Modernization of Web Apps to Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization

 

Optimus Information is pleased to announce that they have earned the Modernization of Web Apps to Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization, a validation of a solution partner’s deep knowledge, extensive experience and proven expertise in migrating and modernizing production web application workloads, and managing app services in Azure. 

Optimus Information is proud to be among the small group of Canadian Microsoft partners that have met the stringent criteria around customer success and staff skilling, as well as pass a third-party audit of their web workload deployment and management practices, including their ability to implement Azure App Service, are able to earn the Modernization of Web Apps in Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization.

“We are thrilled to have earned this advanced specialization. It is reflective of the calibre of our global team, proven Azure experience, and continued partnership with Microsoft Canada.” 

– Pankaj Agarwal – Managing Partner & Founder of Optimus Information

As companies look to modernize their applications and take full advantage of the benefits of the cloud, they are looking for a partner with advanced skills to assess, plan, and modernize the web app to the cloud.

To learn more about how Optimus can help you modernize your applications for the cloud, please contact us at info@optimusinfo.com

/by