We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift when it comes to how we design, build and run applications. Cloud transformation is about refactoring your core business applications to support increased agility, speed and cost efficiency.

Today, most organizations use business applications which was launched during the 90’s. These applications has evolved over the years and become more and more comprehensive and complex by continuous developments and enhancements. They are fundamentally built upon technology which now is more than 20 years old.

We typically call these kind of applications as monoliths, meaning that the system features and logic is tightly connected more or less as a single unit.

In today’s fast moving and disrupting business world, these systems or applications provide a risk for several reasons.

1. Slow

The main problem with monolithic applications is that they are too slow. The principal development methodology is often waterfall which is an outdated way of developing modern applications. Agile methods are now the principal way of developing applications.

  • Constant patches
  • Waterfall
  • Horizontal teams focus on layers
  • Hard to build competence in business domain

2. Expensive

Monolithic applications are usually very expensive and require commercial software and upfront investments/renewal fees.

  • Required use of commercial software
  • Hard to refactor
  • Poor developer productivity
  • Hard to cache granular pieces

3. Inflexible

Monolithic applications are quite inflexible and can’t be customized very well. Customization results in millions of lines of code and is not easy to maintain.

  • Homogeneity of tech stack
  • Can’t deploy multiple versions
  • Hard to outsource
  • APIs exposed retroactively
  • On premises

4. Heavy

Monolithic applications are usually very heavy and rely on big commercial application servers, large databases and big iron infrastructure.

  • Can’t containerize
  • Too heavy with “state”
  • Too much logic in the “pipe” (ESB)
  • Workflow driven processes

5. Unscalable

Monolithic applications are also unscalable and are not able to scale to manage a heavier workload.

  • Upper limits on scaling
  • Auto-scaling is too slow
  • Outages impact entire application
  • Hard to automate provisioning

Refactoring

For the above reasons, you should consider to challenge your existing monolithic systems with a modern application landscape. Designed to be flexible and adjustable to specific needs without the lock-in effect of large monolithic systems.

TIQQE has extensive experience of refactoring monolithic systems to serverless micro services, designed to be flexible and cost efficient.

DevSecOps

We provide a Techlead who works close with your Product Owner to translate business needs to modern technology. The Techlead has a development team which size depends on the size of the project. The team covers all the skills required to design, develop and run the application according to your security requirements.