What is cloud migration and modernisation?
Cloud migration is the process of moving applications, data and infrastructure off traditional datacentre servers and onto a cloud platform such as AWS. Done well, it brings lower running costs, room to scale, and access to a large catalogue of managed services you'd otherwise have to build and run yourself. A migration can be as simple as rehosting an application as-is, or it can mean reworking the application to take advantage of cloud-native features.
Modernising a web application means updating a legacy system to use newer approaches like microservices, serverless computing and containers. Rather than throwing the whole thing away and starting again, modernisation keeps what works and brings the rest up to current standards, supported by DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have changed what's possible with web infrastructure, and put powerful but cost-effective hosting within reach of businesses of any size.
This article looks at the case for moving to the cloud, how a consultancy like Si Novi specialising in AWS can guide the transition, and why modernising a legacy system is often a better bet than replacing it.
I'll also cover how good use of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines keeps deployments reliable and makes continuous improvement realistic.
Why migrate to the cloud?
There are real benefits to cloud infrastructure:
- Cost savings - Cloud infrastructure is modular and configurable, so it can be tailored to what your application actually needs. By modernising your application to use serverless microservices, you can move to a "pay-as-you-go" model, and it's sometimes possible to run parts of your web systems at no cost at all.
- Reliability and redundancy - Rather than hosting your important web systems on a single vulnerable server, cloud hosting can be configured to use multiple servers, cached content delivery and self-healing systems, so your systems stay up.
- Security - Cloud providers such as AWS give you a lot of tools for hardening your web applications. We use AWS's firewall and DDoS solutions to protect applications in the cloud, and AWS services support security measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption, and threat detection through services like AWS GuardDuty.
- Scalability - If your business is growing, your web systems have to grow with it. Cloud infrastructure scales automatically and almost without limit, using efficient services for content delivery and data storage. That flexibility handles both planned growth and the surges you didn't see coming.
- Innovation and agility - With access to Gen AI and Machine Learning, IoT, and serverless computing on AWS, you can build and deploy new ideas quickly. The cloud also makes experimentation cheaper and lower-risk.
How do you migrate applications to AWS?
A structured approach keeps a migration smooth, secure and tied to what the business actually wants out of it. Here's how we handle it:
1. Assessment and strategy
The first step is understanding what you've already got. We run a cloud readiness assessment to work out which applications can move as-is and which need modernising first. From there we put together a plan that fits your goals, budget and timeline.
2. Cloud architecture design
We design the target environment around AWS best practices, with high availability, scalability and fault tolerance built in. We tend to reach for services like Amazon RDS for databases, S3 for storage, and EC2 instances for compute, balancing performance against cost.
3. Migration execution
Depending on what you need, we use one of a few migration strategies:
- Replatforming: Our preferred approach is to replatform a web application onto AWS services such as Elastic Beanstalk. Some changes are needed to get the app performing well on the target services, and along the way parts of the application can be tightened up, made more secure and modernised.
- Refactoring: We redesign parts of the application to make it cloud-native, perhaps using serverless computing or microservices. This takes longer, but it pays off most in performance and scalability.
- Lift and shift: Moving applications to AWS with only minor changes, perhaps onto a containerised environment, which can suit older legacy applications.
4. Monitoring and tuning
A migration isn't finished the moment it goes live. We keep an eye on the application once it's on AWS, watch how it behaves under real traffic, and tune the configuration as we learn what it actually needs.
Don't replace, modernise and recycle
If you're weighing up the cost of replacing or rebuilding a legacy application, it's worth pausing to consider migrating and modernising the one you've got instead.
Rather than scrapping a legacy application, modernising it keeps the core functionality intact while you add new features, improve performance and shore up resilience.
An existing PHP application can be given a new lease of life when it's brought up to modern standards. While we always argue for regular support and maintenance of PHP applications, we often come across sites and applications that haven't been looked after and have grown elderly - running badly, throwing errors and no longer doing their job.
Examples of PHP application modernisation might include:
Upgrading and redeploying to the cloud
An existing PHP application can be modernised by upgrading to the latest PHP version for better performance, security and access to newer features. At the same time, outdated dependencies can be swapped for actively maintained libraries to close off vulnerabilities.
Once it's updated, the application can be deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which gives you an autoscaling environment. Elastic Beanstalk provisions the infrastructure, adjusts capacity to match demand, and handles maintenance tasks like patching, so the application scales without anyone having to babysit it.
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 is often a bottleneck in a monolithic application. Break that out into its own microservice and it can be scaled on its own, which helps performance and reliability.
Modernising your web systems might form part of a wider Digital Transformation strategy, and at Si Novi we're experienced at advising on which bits of web technology are worth hanging on to and modernising, and which are better off replaced entirely.
As specialists in the Yii PHP framework, we're well-practised at migrating Yii 1 applications to Yii 2, and modernising legacy Yii applications to make them more secure and compatible with current web standards.
DevOps and CI/CD
A good migration is about more than the infrastructure - it's also a chance to change the way software gets delivered. We bring in DevOps practices to automate the deployment process and build efficient CI/CD pipelines on AWS.
What is CI/CD?
Continuous Integration (CI) means code changes are merged into a shared repository regularly and tested automatically. Continuous Delivery (CD) automates the release process, so new features or patches reach production with minimal delay.
We use tools like Github Actions and AWS CloudFormation to build CI/CD pipelines that make deployments faster and more reliable. That lets businesses ship updates often and keep their products competitive and free of bugs.
Good DevOps practices, introduced as part of modernising an application, bring a few clear benefits:
- Faster time to market: Automated testing and deployment mean updates can go out quickly.
- Quality you keep hold of: Automated testing catches issues early, before they reach production.
- Less downtime: With blue/green deployments and canary releases, changes roll out gradually, which keeps the risk down.
Worth modernising rather than replacing
Moving to the cloud opens up a lot for a business - room to scale, lower running costs and quicker innovation. With the right partner, getting through the awkward parts of cloud adoption and modernisation is far less painful than going it alone.
We specialise in AWS-based solutions, and we pair the migration itself with modern DevOps practices to keep deployments clean. Replacing a legacy application from scratch is rarely the best-value option, so before you write yours off, it's worth talking through whether it can be modernised incrementally instead - using microservices, serverless computing and CI/CD pipelines to keep improving it over time.
If you've got a legacy web application you're not sure what to do with, get in touch and we'll give you an honest view on whether it's worth modernising or starting again.
