Replatforming is a cost-effective, efficient process to upgrade your technology stack to leverage newer technologies and improve performance, scalability, security, and agility.
As organizations evaluate the best application modernization approach (the best cloud migration strategy), many turn to re-platforming to help reshape or modify an existing application and all its features.
In this article, we’ll cover replatforming with examples. We will also share how to track real-time migration progress and lower the costs to avoid cost surprises.
About Replatforming
Replatforming is the movement of digital infrastructure like servers, databases, websites, applications, etc. from one platform to another to achieve better scalability and performance, decrease cost, or unveil other business benefits.
Replatforming is one of the seven approaches in any application modernization strategy, offering a mid-way between completely rebuilding an app or making almost no changes. Replatforming involves transferring the core functionality, data, and design (or part of it) from one platform to another – the application will work more or less the same but with potentially more desirable features or performance and the ability to tap into cloud features such as scalability. For this reason, the replatform strategy can be known as “lift, tinker, and shift” or “move and improve.”
In most cases of replatforming, infrastructure is moved from an on-premise server to the cloud – hence its link to cloud migration and digital transformation.
How Replatforming Works?
1. Assess your needs
Know what you need by moving to a new platform. Do you need it to be more scalable? Do you need it to integrate with more services? Assess the business goals.
2. Choose a platform that meets your needs
Choose a platform that meets your needs and best suit the infrastructure. If you have look out Shopify, you might looked for a headless option like Contentful or Strapi. If you use Microsoft products or Google, that may skew the platform choice.
3. Update your app or workload
When you know what you are replatforming or what you want to be changed, you can take steps to migrate. Many organizations migrate platforms using containerization, either for the whole app or decoupling the application into parts to allow highly critical elements to move over more rapidly. Evaluate each dependency and integration, make configuration changes, network changes, etc.
4. Migrate to staging
Move the app to the stage to know if you have completed everything important to make the system work on new platform.
5. Validate how it works
Validate how the app works. Is it working as intended? Fix any issues if they arise.
6. Fully transition to production
Switch the apps to production, where further updates or iterations can be easily added.
Why is Replatforming Important?
The objective of replatforming is to take most of the benefits of modern systems, which include:
1. Cloud: The scalability, efficiency, and performance of the cloud.
2. APIs: APIs facilitate data exchange between systems and improve the efficiency of the system in an organization. Moreover, APIs help integrate with third-party services to increase the app’s capabilities.
3. Microservices: The ability to navigate with third-party services that can scale and be replaced or reused as required.
4. Orchestration & Automation: It provides greater use for automation and streamline the deployment processes, supporting DevOps.
Benefits of Replatforming
1. Simple Implementation: Simple and requires only minor code changes, upgrades, or configurations.
2. Lower cost: It follows the lower-cost approach.
3. Performance Optimization: As compared to other modernization approaches, Replatforming provides improved performance optimization.
4. Immediate Business ROI: It offers more immediate business ROI.
Challenges with Replatforming
Some common challenges with replatforming include:
1. Compatibility issues:
If the existing infrastructure does not work properly on the new system as it was expected, it could need more expensive updates to work correctly.
2. Data migration complexity:
Huge amounts of data or data that are complex to store may be difficult to move over if the issues are involved in the process.
3. Integration complexity:
There are two aspects of integration to consider: what is integrated now and post-replatforming. These challenges require determining all integrations and finding new ways to replicate integrations or replace them with other contemporary services. Those integrations can be part of the system in the company.
4. Scope creep:
If not properly planned, it is easy to keep adding more changes or features, minimizing overall ROI when the cost is a factor.
5. Risk of disruption:
Migrating to the new system comes with the risk of disruption if any of the services are unavailable during the transition. Proper planning, testing, and training can help to support the migration.
6. Change management:
Users may need reorientation or training to utilize the new system. Proper time and training programs can help streamline the transition.
Mistakes to Avoid
Replatforming might be difficult sometimes. To minimize disruption, planning the migration process is essential. These are the some of the mistakes to avoid listed below:
- Stick to the business goals to avoid scope creep.
- Make data-driven decisions about packages and platforms.
- Set objectives and track appropriately.
- Have a plan for change management.
- Design and prioritize changes to stay focused and on track.
Replatforming Examples
One of the most prominent examples of replatforming is Amazon. Having started as a monolithic application, Amazon then leveraged replatforming to manage to change better. It used this opportunity to reduce its functional bottlenecks.
Other successful examples of re-platforming include Netflix (migrated the legacy data center infrastructure to AWS) and Capital One (shifted from legacy mainframe systems to the cloud). These companies were able to gain greater scalability and be more agile and cost-effective in their operations. Performance and security also saw an improvement.
Conclusion
Replatforming can save time and money as well as improve time-to-benefit. However, aggressive changes or scope creep can add to your replatforming costs and lengthen the process. This can lead to budget overruns, a vicious cycle that further reduces ROI or diminishes returns for years.
Perimattic can help you stay on budget to reap the full benefits of replatforming.
Perimattic helps you monitor migration costs and progress in real-time as you move workloads to AWS. With Budgets, you can see how that impacts your budget in real-time to avoid overspending.
