Application
Safeguard existing investments whilst building a path to the future.
As your most important applications age they become increasingly expensive to run and may begin to fail user expectations. To maintain a competitive edge, these systems will need to be architected for the future to address evolving business needs.
Why Modernise?
For most business-critical applications, simply ‘lifting and shifting’ to the cloud can result in suboptimal performance and inflated costs. Instead, a more effective strategy is to re-platform or refactor to leverage native AWS services.
Recognising when to modernise is crucial for success. Clear signs include scaling issues, where applications fail to meet increasing user demand, slow and error-prone feature development, prolonged testing and QA cycles, or concerns around data management and regulatory compliance.
Modernisation Challenges
Large monolithic codebases, especially those with millions of lines of code, are difficult to manage and transform. Software rot makes the original code hard to understand, and knowledge gaps emerge as teams change, leaving many with limited understanding of the legacy system. A culture of fear around change slows innovation, keeping teams focused on maintenance. Additionally, the lack of automation in testing and long release cycles hinder rapid iteration and deployment, making it challenging to remain agile in a fast-changing market.
Our Approach – Collaborative Transformation.
Our approach to application modernisation revolves around finding the most suitable and efficient pathway from legacy systems to truly modern, cloud-native applications. We believe in collaborative transformation. That means collaborative modernisation too. We understand that rebuilding from scratch is not always the right approach.
Benefits
- Cost Efficiency: With a pay-for-value pricing model, Serverless drastically reduces operational and maintenance costs, eliminating unnecessary overhead and undifferentiated work.
- On-Demand Scaling: Modernising to AWS Serverless ensures automatic scaling of resources and costs based on actual usage, providing flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
- Innovation at Speed: Modular architecture reduces the risk of changes in individual services, enabling more frequent updates, less maintenance, and greater time for experimentation.
- Modern Stack: The result is a high-performance AWS cloud-native application built with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and strong test coverage, ensuring agility and reliability.
- Risk Reduction: We reduce risk by leveraging pre-validated modernisation patterns and expert guidance from experienced cloud architects.
- Upskill Your Team: We collaborate with your engineers, transferring knowledge and empowering your team to manage and evolve the modernised application independently.
4 Pillars of a Modern Serverless Application
Serverless Microservices
fourTheorem’s founders are leaders in microservices and serverless. We have published books and papers on these subjects and we have successful deployments under our belt.
What does this mean for you?
- Microservices means building your system from separate components that can be created and deployed independently.
- Microservices are now an established best practice. Done right, they give you faster development time, improved quality and vastly increased stability for your users.
- Serverless is the future of software. You build and deploy small, manageable components without thinking about servers or infrastructure.
- Serverless also means using managed services for things like user accounts, storage and analytics – the parts of your system that are not unique to your core business. This decreases costs significantly and gets you where you want to be much faster.
Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD)
CI/CD is about automating every step in the build, test and deployment of your system. fourTheorem delivers on this practice for all our projects. Why is this an essential part of modern application development?
- Every time you commit completed code for a new feature, that code arrives in your production system without manual intervention.
- We avoid the risk posed by manual steps and inevitable human error.
- Automated deployment ensures much faster delivery.
- Test automation gives you assurance around quality.
- CI/CD done right ensures an end to crippling instability and constant firefighting.
Infrastructure-as-Code
The concept of DevOps means breaking down the barriers between development and operations. It allows the full team to take ownership of a feature from concept to running in production. You move faster by removing the communication bottlenecks. DevOps done right means using Infrastructure as Code. What does that look like for you?
- Your cloud infrastructure is written in code instead of using individual, manual steps. All parts of your system, not just the software, are deployed using an automated process.
- You have full visibility on every single change to your entire system.
- When required, you can rebuild your entire system with the press of a button.
- You get a system that is predictable, repeatable and testable.
Observability
We are not just about getting your system into production fast. Observability is about everything that happens afterwards. After all, that’s the most important part, when you are delivering value to your end users. Observability is the practice of ensuring you build software in a way that gives you full insight into what is happening when it runs.
- You want to detect issues before your users do.
- Insights from your production system allow you to constantly improve production quality and performance
- The right metrics are easily available, giving you a deep understanding of what your users are experiencing
