Refactoring applications for cloud migration

Enterprises while migrating to cloud needs to devise a migration strategy that can truly address their business goals, optimize the cost of migration and take into account the refactoring required. 

Refactoring means re-architecting your applications so that your application is compatible with the cloud platform and can run on the cloud infrastructure with maximum efficiency. It may involve making code changes while ensuring that the external behavior of your application remain unaltered. For example, if your application utilizes a lot of resources, it may increase your cloud billing. So, redesigning your application for optimal resource utilization is required before migrating to cloud. Refactoring is done so that you can have maximum leverage of the benefits of cloud native environment. Refactoring may be a time and resource consuming activity but it has multiple benefits like 

• Long term reduction in cost – Refactoring helps to match resource consumption of applications with their demand, thereby eliminating waste and reducing cost. It helps drive better ROI on your applications in the long term than other applications which are less cloud native 
• Higher resilience- With refactoring, the application starts inheriting the resilience built in cloud 

• Auto scaling- Refactoring may be done to leverage the cloud autoscaling capabilities with demand 

Refactoring limitations 

• Refactoring requires high technical expertise in application automation, cloud and others which may not be available with the organization 
• Refactoring consumes a considerable amount of time in cloud migration project thereby increasing consumption of resources and cost of the project 

• Refactoring requires changing at the basic code and multiple levels. So, there is maximum probability of things going wrong and causing delays, increment in costs and outages 

When should you choose refactoring? 

Your business should choose refactoring when you want to scale, improve performance or add extra features. It is must if you want to leverage the cloud native benefits to maximum  

Ways of refactoring 

1. Complete refactoring- In this type of refactoring 50% of the application code is changed and the database is upgraded to utilize maximum of the cloud native features that can be used by the application 

2. Minimum Viable refactoring- This involves making minor changes in the applications like incorporating native cloud security and others. For minimum viable refactoring, you can 

• Upgrade your Os 

• Upgrade your framework versions 
• Upgrade access management 
• Explore database options 

3. Containerized Refactoring- In this, applications are transferred to containers with minimum modification. Applications remaining within the containers help users to implement cloud native features 

Factors impacting application refactoring efforts  

• The total number of inbound and outbound interfaces 
• The DevOps set up 
• The amount of code to be refactored 
• OS or database changes or upgradations required 
• Application architecture, framework and the OS 

• Maturity of the technology stack  

And more