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Cloudera's Field CTO told Silverlinings modernizing apps is tougher than just lifting and shifting them to the cloud
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Limited staff knowledge of legacy apps is part of the problem
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Shutting down old systems also takes plenty of time and effort
Enterprises are under pressure to move to the cloud to make their business processes more efficient and to take advantage of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). But transforming legacy apps into cloud native ones is easier said than done. That’s because the thing about refactoring is that you have to make sure the rebuilt apps actually work, Cloudera’s Field CTO Carolyn Duby told Silverlinings.
“Moving a workload from one place to another, it’s not so bad,” she said, referencing a “lift and shift” style transition to the cloud. “But if you’re going to move a workload from one place to another and then modernize it in the process, there’s a lot of validation that goes with that to make sure the application is running.”
For those not in the know, Cloudera is a cloud-based data management platform. It provides an abstraction layer so that clients can store and analyze data across cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
But wait, you might say. If I’m just taking a legacy app and making it do the exact same thing in the cloud, why is that hard? Why is so much testing involved?
Well, Duby said part of the problem with legacy apps is that the systems they run on are sometimes decades old. Thus, when you factor in retirements, layoffs and simple job transitions, there are a limited number of people remaining on staff who still know what a given application even does. On top of that, sometimes enterprises decide to consolidate apps with similar functions as part of their move to the cloud. In that case, the cloud migration team has to sort out and boil down several different ways of operating and approaching a task into a single cloud app.
“So, it’s really tricky to be able to be able to do this kind of modernization that’s not just a lift and shift,” Duby said.
She likened it to a home remodeling project in which a broken faucet prompts a sink replacement but that also requires the counter to be replaced.
Then there’s the process of turning up the new cloud-based system and shutting down the legacy one. Duby noted this is usually done in phases rather than all at once and can be “quite lengthy.”
All in all “modernization will give the most benefit, but there’s a lot of validation [involved] to make sure the application will do what it is supposed to do,” she concluded.
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