Why the Cloud Offers the Best Opportunity to Modernize

Businesses migrate to the cloud to take advantage of cloud native services. The ability to more easily break down monolithic applications and application ecosystems into microservices, along with being able to scale infrastructure and application capacity on demand, are just some of those advantages. But achieving success with cloud native infrastructure requires a cultural shift in organizational operations, specifically around technology adoption and experimentation.

To realize the benefits of cloud native, your organization will need to address three critical areas:

1. The easy adoption of new technologies
2. The freedom to experiment with confidence
3. The ability to scale with ease

By embedding these three areas into your operations while using New Relic as a strategic advisor along the way, your team will be set up for a successful digital transformation. 

Adopt new technologies easily

To adopt new technologies easily, you need the right platform and operating model.

The right platform has the services that enable you to most effectively modernize your applications, and the right operating model lets you have full visibility into your resources. This combination allows stakeholders in your organization to see how the platform and the technology are serving your business. New Relic One simplifies the adoption of new technologies and rearchitecting of your applications to use cloud native best practices in containerization, microservices, managed services, and platform as a service offerings.

New Relic One ingests data from across your full digital stack, allowing you to view key metrics like response time, error rates, traffic, and throughput from your applications. This becomes extremely important as you break apart a monolithic app into microservices. Having metrics visibility during this process gives you clear insight into whether you need to roll something back and continue testing, or whether you can turn on the full flow of traffic to your new set of applications.

Experiment with confidence

Having the confidence to experiment by failing fast and recovering quickly is key not only to your digital cloud migration roadmap, but also to the developer experience. Cultivating a culture where developers are comfortable taking risks, iterating on, and breaking code is incredibly important, and cloud offers organizations the opportunity to make this cultural shift.

True agility comes with experimentation, but doing so with confidence requires full stack observability.

The ability to scale

Adopting new technologies easily and experimenting with confidence contribute directly to how well you can scale. If you have clear visibility of resource consumption and application performance (and how those two connect), then you know ahead of time how many resources to give to a Kubernetes cluster, for example, or which parts of your monolithic app you should break into microservices. Such knowledge allows you to scale services and resources in a very efficient manner and ensure you meet your end users’ demands on your new cloud native application stack.

In fact, one of the greatest advantages of cloud is that it operates on an “as needed” basis. That means, not only does it enable your team to scale up to meet demand, it also allows you to scale down after a busy period such as Black Friday. You only pay for what you use.

Observability by Design 

New Relic helps you achieve all three areas by giving you visualizations of the telemetry you send it. As a platform, New Relic helps your cross-functional teams unify around one central source of truth. You can apply intelligence to alerts and analyze comprehensive data sets (metrics, events, logs, and traces) to make meaningful connections between them.

“Observability by Design” is a phrase we coined with one of our customers, Service NSW. In practice, it involves embedding New Relic instrumentation into the fiber of your cloud native adoption strategy and practice. By instrumenting your complete stack, you’re able to leverage New Relic as a strategic advisor. When you activate full-stack observability on top of telemetry collected by New Relic, you’ll accelerate the success of your cloud native adoption strategy.

Cloud offers the most disruptive technology solutions and integrations, and New Relic provides best-in-class DevOps experience to ensure your unified team uses the cloud the way it’s designed to be used. Not only does this give you true cloud benefits of agility and scalability, but it can also produce additional cost savings when you, for example, adopt cloudmanaged services or serverless architectures. 

Digital modernization requires innovation, and innovation necessitates disruptive technologies and elite developers. By adopting a cloud native practice and culture that embodies these core values, your organization will unlock the true value of the cloud.

To learn more about application modernization, check out our playbook, “Ready, Set, Modernize! A Mini Playbook for Application Modernization on AWS.”