Modernization - Its Place in Cloud Computing

Modernization is when you transform your cloud applications, and infrastructure to be higher-value, utilizing more efficient cloud structures. Here we’re going to look at when and why to modernize, what that process looks like, and how it can help your business reach new heights.

Why Modernize Your Cloud Infrastructure?

Like so many systems that haven’t been maintained, your cloud environment can begin to experience issues. The top symptoms of an out-of-date environment:

• Having continuous bugs that appear in your applications
• Experiencing recurring inconsistencies
• Your environment is becoming unreliable
• Having outages of your applications 
• Deployments failing consistently

When these symptoms appear in your environment, the cure is to modernize. The process will maximize the value of your cloud space. It also improves your application’s efficiency, drives growth, and customer satisfaction.

Modernization Processes

To modernize your cloud applications and infrastructures there are some clear changes that you can make to speed up, stabilize, and make your AWS accounts more secure.

• EC2 and ECS: EC2, or elastic compute cloud, and ECS, or elastic container service are cloud computing resources. They both use virtual machines under the hood, but ECS manages containers on top of the underlying instances. Both improve communication between services and speed up service creation using containers, but ECS enables you to scale faster.
• Auto Scaling: Setting up AWS auto scaling empowers you to optimize performance and costs.
• Containers: By containerizing (or bundling your code with files and libraries it needs to run) you make deployment faster. It reduces the development lifecycle, by reducing the time between writing code and launching it. With this improvement, you speed up innovation and improve customer satisfaction.
• Automate processes: When modernizing your environment, you can create an automated development pipeline to automatically upload improvements and fixes to the platform without needing manual interventions. You can also create new ECS or EC2 services at the click of a button to speed up service creation as well.
• Include AI: At StratusGrid, we’re developing integrating AI into testing. After a human has created a docker file, StratusGrid is starting to use GenAI to test, saving your team hours in development time.

Modernization Brings Better Performance and Stability

Once the process is complete you will begin to see these improvements:

• Increased infrastructure security
• Improved application speed, performance, and stability
• Improved development rates, with new releases speeding up. According to AWS, the time to market for new features goes down by 43%.
• Cost optimization by making your cloud environment higher value and more efficient. AWS reports that these savings are 20% on average.
• More automation around deployment which saves you and your team time
• According to AWS, your total cost of ownership (TCO) can be reduced by 64% when you modernize

All these improvements improve team morale and performance. As you’ll be able to release improvements and innovations faster, clients will also become more satisfied with your products. This in turn should help sales and drive growth. 

Amplified Life Network’s Improved Speed and Efficiency

Amplified Life Network’s AWS environment was using Amazon S3 and Amazon Cloudfront to host content. However, it hadn’t been fully configured and the team wasn’t confident in their cloud systems. 

StratusGrid took over the project and they:

• Reconfigured the CloudFront distribution, 
• Built analytics with Amazon Athena, 
• Implemented best practices to increase security, content organization, and data
• Designed and built a custom Lambda function that uses a Simple Notification Service (SNS) to improve communication while using the platform
• Provided documentation and training on AWS.
  

With these changes, the Amplified Life Network’s team felt more confident using AWS, they used AWS tools more effectively, maximizing their value, and improving their platform’s speed and efficiency.

How StratusGrid Can Transform Your AWS Cloud

StratusGrid has over a decade of experience working with AWS environments. We follow AWS's best practices for modernization. For every cloud modernization project, we follow 4 key steps:

1. Align:  We work with you to understand your needs and goals. We identify how to measure results and share a baseline before we begin working directly in your AWS account.
2. Plan: The next step is to create a detailed plan of action aligned with your goals. We also do a full risk analysis and have a plan to mitigate them.
3. Test: We test all our assumptions and do pilots to remove risk. We then execute the full plan alongside your team.
4. Review: This is when we review the results with you. We do a full presentation with your stakeholders to discuss the impact and measure results together.

Cloud modernization with StratusGrid improves your cost optimization. AWS also reports an average of 69% reduction in unplanned downtime after modernizing. Modernize your infrastructure with us to improve efficiency, security, and scalability.

BONUS: Find Out if Your Organization is Ready for The Cloud ⤵️