What is Cloud Migration and Modernisation?
Cloud Migration refers to the process of moving applications, data, and infrastructure from traditional datacentre servers to a cloud platform, such as AWS. It enables organisations to reduce costs, improve scalability, enhance performance, and gain access to advanced tools and services. Migration can involve rehosting applications as-is or optimising them for cloud-native features.
Modernisation of Web Applications involves updating legacy systems to leverage modern technologies like microservices, serverless computing, and containers. Rather than replacing entire applications, modernisation ensures systems remain relevant, agile, and cost-efficient, supporting continuous improvement through DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
As organisations seek agility, resilience, and innovation, cloud migration has become essential. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have revolutionised web infrastructure options, and allow powerful but cost-effective web infrastructure to be available to businesses of all sizes.
This article explores the advantages of moving to the cloud, how a cloud consultancy like Si Novi specialising in AWS can guide the transition, and why modernising rather than replacing legacy systems unlocks long-term value.
We also discuss how making effective use of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines ensures seamless deployments and continuous improvement.
Why migrate to the Cloud?
There are many benefits of Cloud infrastructure:
- Cost savings - Cloud infrastructure is modular and configurable, and so can be tailored precisely to the demands of your application. Furthermore by modernising your application and utilising serverless microservices, you can leverage a "pay-as-you-go" model and it's sometimes possible run parts of your web systems at no cost.
- Reliability & Redundancy - Rather than hosting your important web systems on a vulnerable single server, Cloud hosting can be configured to use multiple servers, cached content delivery and self-healing systems to ensure that your systems are always available.
- Security - Cloud providers such as AWS have numerous tools for enhancing the security of your web applications. We utilise AWS's Firewall and DDoS solutions to secure web applications in the cloud. AWS services facilitates delivery of security protocols such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption, and threat detection through services like AWS GuardDuty.
- Scalability - If your business is growing your web systems must grow with it. Cloud infrastructure is capable of scaling automatically and almost infinitely, using highly efficient services for content delivery and data storage. This flexibility supports both planned growth and unanticipated surges.
- Innovation and Agility - With access to Gen AI and Machine Learning, IoT, and serverless computing on AWS, companies can rapidly build and deploy new solutions. The cloud also supports faster experimentation with lower costs and risks.
How do you migrate applications to AWS?
Following a structured approach ensures your cloud migration is smooth, secure, and aligned with your business objectives. Here's how we handle the process:
1. Assessment and Strategy Development
The first step is understanding your current infrastructure. We conduct a cloud readiness assessment to identify which applications can move as-is and which require modernisation. Our team then develops a tailored strategy, considering your goals, budget, and timeline.
2. Cloud Architecture Design
We design your target environment based on AWS best practices, ensuring high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. Our architects leverage services like Amazon RDS for databases, S3 for storage, and EC2 instances for compute power, balancing performance with cost efficiency.
3. Migration Execution
Depending on your needs, we use several migration strategies:
- Replatforming: Our preferred approach is replatform a web application on AWS services such as Elastic Beanstalk. Some modifications are necessary to optimise performance of the app on the target AWS services, and during this process aspects of the application may be enhanced, made more secure and modernised.
- Refactoring: We redesign parts of the application to make it cloud-native, perhaps using serverless computing or microservices. This approach is more time-consuming but offers the greatest benefits in terms of performance and scalability.
- Lift and Shift: Moving applications to AWS with only minor changes, perhaps onto a containerised environment which may be suitable for legacy applications.
4. Monitoring and tweaking
Don't replace, modernise and recycle
If you're evaluating the cost effectiveness of replacing or rebuilding your existing legacy applications, then spare a thought for migrating and modernising your web application.
Instead of discarding legacy applications, modernisation offers a practical path forward. This approach preserves core functionality while introducing new features, improving performance, and enhancing resilience.
Existing PHP applications can be given a new lease of life when brought up to modern standards. While we advocate regular support and maintenance of PHP applications, we often come across websites or applications have not been maintained and have become elderly - performing badly, throwing errors and no longer serving their purpose.
Examples of PHP application modernisation could include:
Upgrading and redeploying to the cloud
An existing PHP application can be modernised by upgrading to the latest PHP version to improve performance, security, and access to new features. Alongside this, outdated dependencies can be replaced with actively maintained libraries to prevent vulnerabilities.
Once updated, the application can be deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which offers an autoscaling environment. Elastic Beanstalk automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure, adjusts capacity based on demand, and handles maintenance tasks like patching, allowing the application to scale efficiently without manual intervention.
Introducing a Microservices Architecture:
If the PHP application is monolithic, its functionality can be split into smaller, independent microservices. A good example is document generation or data export which can often be a bottleneck in a monolithic application. By breaking this functionality into a separate microservice, it can be scaled independently, improving performance and reliability.
Modernising your web systems might form part of your wider Digital Transformation strategy, and at Si Novi we're experienced at advising on which aspects of web technology are worth hanging on to and modernising, and which are better to be replaced entirely.
As specialists in the Yii PHP framework, we're experts at migrating Yii 1 applications to Yii 2, and modernising legacy Yii applications in order to make them more secure and compatible with current web standards.
DevOps and CI/CD: Driving Continuous Improvement
A successful migration goes beyond the cloud infrastructure itself—it's about transforming the way software is delivered. Our consultancy integrates DevOps practices to automate and streamline deployment processes, creating efficient CI/CD pipelines on AWS.
What is CI/CD?
Continuous Integration (CI) ensures that code changes are regularly merged into a shared repository and tested automatically. Continuous Delivery (CD) automates the release process, enabling new features or patches to be deployed to production environments with minimal delay.
We use tools like Github Actions and AWS CloudFormation to create robust CI/CD pipelines that improve speed and reliability of application deployments. This allows businesses to deliver frequent updates, ensuring their products remain competitive and bug-free.
Good DevOps processes brought in through application modernisation bring several benefits, including:
- Faster Time to Market: Automated testing and deployment cycles mean updates can be released swiftly.
- Improved and retained quality: Automated testing ensures that issues are identified and resolved early.
- Reduced downtime: With blue/green deployments and canary releases, changes can be rolled out incrementally, reducing risks.
Conclusion
Migrating to the cloud unlocks tremendous opportunities for businesses by improving scalability, reducing costs, and enabling rapid innovation. With the right partner, companies can navigate the complexities of cloud adoption and modernisation efficiently.
Our consultancy, specialising in AWS-based solutions, ensures a smooth migration while integrating modern DevOps practices to enhance deployment flows. As an alternative to replacing legacy applications, we can explore modernising them incrementally, leveraging microservices, serverless computing, and CI/CD pipelines to drive continuous improvement.
The result is a future-proof digital infrastructure, better suited to handle today's dynamic business challenges and positioned for sustainable growth in the years ahead.
