Code Restructure to Microservices for Maximum ROI on GSA Schedule

Microservices cloud native refactoring on Cloud technologies has revolutionized how organizations build applications. Especially in cases where new applications are being built, leveraging the benefits of the cloud can help to maximize ROI. This is not just through the upfront and on-going cost-reductions, but also indirectly through other benefits such as microservices performance and scalability which will be experienced in the long run.

More and more Defense and Federal organizations are opting to migrate their applications to the cloud due to the difficulties in managing legacy hardware and large technical teams. Cloud services pricing can be much more economical due to the economies of scale enjoyed by enterprise public cloud providers.

However, the process of refactoring becomes more complicated for legacy applications. This is mainly due to technology lock-ins associated with older applications. Simply rehosting the application on the cloud does not result in many benefits other than for potential cost savings. As such, it is vital to identify the best possible migration strategy.

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Cloud Migration Strategies

There are many approaches to cloud migration. While there are many popular strategies, they all consist of varying degrees of refactoring prior to migration. These are some of the better-known strategies:

• Rehost (Lift and shift) – move the application to cloud hosting without any considerable changes to the application
• Re-platform – similar to rehosting, but may include the minimum changes required to host in the cloud
• Repurchase – change to a different cloud-based product due to the incompatibilities of the existing application or higher cost
• Microservices Refactoring (Re-architecting to Microservices) – truly enhance the application to suit the cloud with code changes and other enhancements

Microservices Cloud Native Code Refactoring

While rehosting and re-platforming can lead to short term cost-savings, the applications will remain to be monolithic and inflexible to changes in the business. This will result in the performance improvements that are expected not being realized. While there may not be a considerable upfront cost for migrating to the cloud in this way, there may not be a significant ROI due to the application not being able to accommodate innovation and growth of the business.

Some types of refactoring like Minimum Viable refactoring, containerizing, microservices, and converting to serverless can be more effective than the approaches mentioned earlier. However, a complete microservices refactor on GSA Schedule is known to return maximum results.

To truly reap the benefits of cloud technologies, it is essential to cloud native refactor applications from their monolithic architectural state to microservices based components. While this process entails many long-term benefits, it can also be a time-consuming and effort-intensive process.

It is known that this process of complete code refactoring can affect up to 50% of the codebase and include significant changes to the database. This will enable integrating with many cloud-native microservices features such as security extensions, AI, machine learning, IoT, and image processing. If correctly implemented, this approach can result in many huge performance benefits.

Being microservices container based will also offer non-functional benefits such as performance, security, and scalability. Scalability is one of the most well-known benefits of the cloud as they offer almost infinite resources based on the needs of the business.

Security and performance are integrated at the core of cloud services through capable GovCloud regions and 24/7 monitoring. This can ensure that your microservices application is always available and also have minimum millisecond latency through multi-region cloud infrastructure.

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Costs associated with Cloud Migration

To really understand the Return on Investment (ROI) of cloud native refactoring and cloud migration, an in-depth understanding of the current IT costs is required. This will include not only direct costs like server and infrastructure costs but also personnel costs, development costs, licensing fees, and shadow IT costs (things like training costs). This will be the starting point because one of the most important expectations of cloud migration is cost savings.

Thereafter it will be important to identify all the costs involved with the migration. While the individual line items will be different for each organization and each migration, but the following will be the most probable costs involved.

Microservices Cloud Platform and Cloud Native Refactoring costs

This is the first and most important cost to be considered. It is also rather simple to do so because many cloud service providers have online calculators. However, it is crucial to plan ahead for the growth of the business, considering the infrastructure needs for at least the next five years.

Refactoring costs

This could be the most significant cost item. This is due to the sheer amount of effort required to re-architect an application to fully leverage cloud native refactoring. Larger legacy applications can require thousands of man-hours of refactoring. In addition, there will be effort included for quality assurance, introducing new features required during this period, and documentation.

Migration costs

Once the application is ready for migration, there will be further costs involved in the actual migration. These can include data transfer costs as well as the losses associated with the down-time involved with the migration.

Post-migration costs

These include indirect costs like training for teams to become familiar with the new infrastructure and the new microservices cloud-native application.

Maximizing ROI with Microservices

This is a two-fold process, including a robust plan to reduce costs and maximize returns. The reduction of costs begins with optimizing the existing IT teams and infrastructure based on the proposed cloud migration. This may include development skills alignment initiatives and IT tools modernization for cloud with restructuring of on-premise infrastructure to accommodate higher bandwidth to cloud requirements.

Identifying the most suitable GovCloud microservices provider is another important factor. This will need to consider not only the current pricing structure and suitability but long-term contracts and possible options for scaling.

Microservices refactoring and migration costs can be the most significant, and it is essential to have come up with an expert plan that anticipates all possible risks and outcomes. Regular health checks and monitoring of microservices development can ensure that work is progressing according to the plan so that budgets are not over-run.

The effectiveness of the GSA Schedule microservices refactoring process will be another important factor as it will determine the on-going returns from the migration. The direct result will be cost-savings on an on-going basis. However, the more significant return is from enhancements to the business and its related processes. These will lead to more transactions and in turn, reduce the application cost per microservice transaction.

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Conclusion to Cloud Native Refactoring

Contracting CCT to manage the code refactor process within a predefined budget and ensuring that the application is converted to a microservice-based architecture that can fully leverage the power of cloud microservices will lead to the highest ROI.

However, to ensure that the migration continues to provide positive returns both in terms of cost-savings as well as better facilitation of business processes, it will be important to maintain the efforts of optimizing it with cloud microservices focus.