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Most large enterprises run some form of legacy applications, for which updates and replacements can be costly and time-consuming, not to mention potentially risky. But failing to modernize out-of-date systems can ultimately damage app performance via slow runtime speeds and poor load balancing.
Many organizations have begun to take on modernization projects with containers, to gain benefits such as portability and scalability, better speed and resource management, and granular visibility. One of the primary challenges to modernization is to get the entire IT team on board, said Chris Gardner, senior analyst at Forrester.
Developers typically are ahead of the curve, while operations teams drag their feet to maintain a currently functional — and secure — architecture. Enterprises’ reliance on time-consuming manual processes and tools that were de rigueur with legacy applications also hinders modernization efforts. If a batch process is how you’ve always done things, and the application is stable because of this, sysadmins will be loath to change it — especially in a risk-averse industry such as finance or healthcare. But manual processes take up valuable time and leave room for error, a bottleneck that opens the door to automation.
Developers won’t naturally become ops people; it’s not in their nature, Gardner said. They need to continue to focus on delivering apps and user experiences as quickly as possible. Instead, systems administrators must become developers to revitalize production support for applications. They also must emphasize proven ops processes while adopting new methods, such as infrastructure as code. Continue reading