A generalized framework for legacy application modernization to the cloud

Abstract

The ever-growing demand of cloud computing services has presented a major impact on the technologies being used for the IT service provisioning. This change has been benefited in the form of increased business agility, scalability, flexibility and reduced operational costs of the computing systems. The pay-as-you-use model of computing as utility model has been facing obstacles in myriad of traditional on premise computing systems which are offering needful services with legacy computing environment. These systems have been built on older programming environments with sequential programming methods but the valuable business logic and data being handled cannot be discarded. This legacy problem is one of the main challenges for cloud computing to deal with. When re-architecting and reengineering these legacy systems, parallel computing approaches also need to be assessed for resource optimization in cloud environments. The proposed approach presents a generalized framework for modernization of the legacy applications to the cloud. Beginning from the source application assessment to the target infrastructure decision making process, essential quality characteristics are also considered to handle this multi-dimensional issue. The decision support module is followed by the elaboration of available modernization approaches and their associated risks with implementation phases. Additionally, this work explores the usage of parallel programming methodologies to deal with existing sequential approaches and large datasets are introduced with Hadoop architecture. The configuration and deployment of applications with parallelism presents a powerful manner of these cloud computing technologies.