App modernization is now a buzz word similar to Devops or Cloud Native. The word means different things to different people. Ask a Platform Engineer and he/she would explain modernization as lift and shift from private cloud to the public cloud. A developer might refer to it as the containerization for legacy apps. 

Application modernization is a new way wherein new tools and techniques are needed to assist the human-powered refactoring. All the major enterprise vendors are in a rush to help enterprises modernize workloads along with all layers of the IaaS and PaaS stack. 

Legacy Middleware – A significant percentage of customer application estates are non-cloud native apps running on non-microservices frameworks. Developers get tired waiting for an app restart, which can take about 1-5 mins and an inner loop developer experience that ties them to older JavaEE frameworks and app server libraries. 

Legacy Java – Most Enterprise workloads are still running on Java 8, Java 7 and Java 6 and on their way migrating to Java 11/14.  Older versions of Java prevent upgrades and are generally not container friendly.  Older versions of Java are also a source of security vulnerabilities.

Legacy Spring – Spring Framework is the # 1 Java microservices framework in the enterprise. Lack of CI/CD practices has led to applications using older versions of Spring Framework (<5) and Spring Boot (<2). Enterprises need help in upgrading and patching their versions of Spring.

Read on to know more about app modernization.