Rearchitecting: why you should redesign your application
Rearchitecting is a fundamental redesign of your application’s architecture aimed at making it cloud-native. This process is essential for leveraging modern cloud capabilities, improving scalability, and enhancing performance.
Key takeaways on rearchitecting
- Rearchitecting involves a fundamental redesign of an application to optimise its architecture for cloud-native environments, enhancing scalability, performance, and alignment with business goals.
- Companies should consider rearchitecting when dealing with legacy applications challenged by outdated technologies, compliance issues, or insufficient scalability to meet organisational growth.
- Key benefits of rearchitecting include improved fault tolerance, accelerated development, dynamic scaling, and reduced maintenance costs, though it also poses risks such as budget overruns and operational disruptions.
What is rearchitecting in the context of application modernisation?
Unlike simple updates or patches, rearchitecting fundamentally changes the existing application architecture to leverage the myriad benefits provided by cloud infrastructures.
This process often includes transitioning from monolithic applications to cloud native architectures, such as microservices, serverless functions, or containerised environments. The goal is to create applications that are more scalable, maintainable, secure, and easier to integrate with other systems.
Rearchitecting is typically chosen when an application’s current structure limits its ability to scale, adapt, or support innovation.
It’s a strategic move aimed at future-proofing critical systems and enabling the organisation to deliver features faster, reduce technical debt, and respond more effectively to business changes.
Read more about application modernisation: Application modernisation: a guide for business leaders
Stay competitive and ensure long-term business success by modernising your applications. With our approach, you can start seeing real value even within the first 4 weeks.
When should a company consider rearchitecting an application for the cloud?
Identifying the right time to rearchitect an application is key to maximising cloud migration benefits.
Legacy applications often rely on outdated technologies, making them difficult to maintain and secure. Technological debt accumulated over the years can create significant challenges, highlighting the need for a comprehensive rearchitecting process.
End-of-life components within an application’s architecture can also trigger the need for rearchitecting.
These components must be replaced with modern, supported alternatives to ensure the application’s longevity and compatibility with current standards:
Additionally, as businesses grow, their applications may struggle to handle larger workloads, necessitating a redesign for better scalability and performance.
Changes in the market, emerging competitors, and technological advancements can also necessitate the rearchitect applications of an application. When existing application architecture struggles to integrate with modern systems or cloud environment, it’s time to consider redesigning.
Rearchitecting can help align your applications with current business objectives and needs, driving performance and scalability improvements that support organisational growth.
Finally, changing compliance standards and regulations can make rearchitecting substantive. Applications that cannot adapt to these changes can hinder business operations and expose the organisation to legal risks.
What are the key business drivers for rearchitecting?
Common drivers for rearchitecting include the need to reduce technical debt, improve scalability, enable faster innovation, integrate with modern systems, or support new digital business models.
As user bases and data volumes grow, monolithic or outdated architectures can’t scale efficiently. Modern cloud services allows applications to support increased demand, often through microservices or cloud-native architectures.
Legacy systems are often slow to change. Rearchitecting enables faster development, testing, and deployment cycles – making it easier to respond quickly to market changes and customer needs.
Modern architectures are more resource-efficient. Rearchitecting reduces long-term operational and maintenance costs by optimising infrastructure use, enabling auto-scaling, and supporting pay-as-you-go cloud models.
Businesses often need to integrate their systems with modern cloud platforms, APIs, and third-party services. Rearchitecting supports more modular and interoperable systems that are easier to connect.
Rearchitecting is often a foundational step in larger digital transformation programs, enabling AI, automation, and data-driven innovation through more flexible, modern systems.
Thanks to our work, we decreased the lead time for changes from 2 months to 1 day, improved change failure rate from over 30% to below 10%, and saved 50% of the client’s Cloud costs.
What are the benefits of rearchitecting?
Rearchitecting applications offers numerous benefits that can significantly enhance an organisation’s operations and competitive edge.
Dynamic scaling, which matches resource usage with workload demands, is a notable advantage, resulting in efficient resource management. Migration process enables auto-scaling and elastic resource scaling, which are often not possible with older systems, providing enhanced cloud scalability.
Improved fault tolerance is another key benefit. Microservices architectures enable rearchitected applications to handle failures more effectively, enhancing resilience. Cloud features like redundancy and disaster recovery further bolster resilience, ensuring continuous operation during disruptions:
- The advantages and disadvantages of Cloud Computing
- Cloud DR strategy: ensuring continuous business operations
Rearchitecting also accelerates the development and deployment of new features.
A cloud-native approach improves developer productivity and supports faster release cycles through DevOps processes. This rapid development capability allows businesses to respond quickly to market changes and customer demands, driving innovation and growth.
Finally, rearchitecting can lower maintenance expenses and overall costs through automation and efficient technologies. Reduced total cost of ownership, a financial advantage of cloud-native architectures, makes them attractive for businesses aiming to optimise operations and reduce costs.
What are the risks or challenges associated with rearchitecting?
Rearchitecting applications, while beneficial, involves significant changes and challenges in the context of a rearchitected application.
Here are some primary concerns:
- Budget overruns
- Timeline extensions due to process complexities
- Unforeseen issues that disrupt schedules
- Increased costs
These challenges are particularly prevalent when rearchitecting legacy applications.
Operational disruption is also a significant risk. The rearchitecting process can severely impact business continuity, especially if the existing application architecture is deeply integrated into daily operations.
Legacy software is associated with increased cyber threats and technological lag, presenting significant operational risks that must be carefully managed.
Security risks are a major concern. Legacy applications, with weak encryption and obsolete security protocols, are attractive targets for cyberattacks. Additionally, outdated and unstable platforms can hinder the ability to meet evolving user needs, resulting in significant stability issues.
Performance issues such as slower response times and system failures are common during peak periods with older systems, underscoring the need for careful planning and risk management.
How do you decide if rearchitecting is the right modernisation approach?
Here are some key points to consider:
- Rearchitecting is seen as a comprehensive overhaul of applications to fully utilise cloud capabilities.
- Replatforming serves as a middle ground, enhancing applications without a complete redesign.
- Fully rearchitected applications are more adaptable to new cloud services, enabling faster innovation and integration with emerging technologies.
Rearchitecting is the right choice when your current system cannot meet future demands, and your organisation is ready to invest in a strategic, future-focused transformation.
Organisations that aim to take full advantage of cloud-native technologies – like microservices, containers, and serverless computing – often find that rearchitecting is necessary to build the foundation for scalable and resilient cloud infrastructure.
If you’re unsure, starting with a technical assessment or modernisation roadmap is a smart first step.
What KPIs should be tracked to measure rearchitecting success?
Tracking specific KPIs that reflect performance and efficiency is essential for measuring the success of rearchitecting applications.
Continuous monitoring ensure applications leverage cloud capabilities effectively. Cloud monitoring tools provide valuable insights into application performance and resource usage post-migration.
Periodic performance assessments and refined resource distribution maximise the advantages of rearchitecting. Implementing auto-scaling features can significantly enhance application resource management after rearchitecting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does rearchitecting always involve cloud migration?
Not necessarily, but it often goes hand-in-hand with cloud adoption, especially when aiming to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities like auto-scaling, serverless computing, or container orchestration.
What architectures are commonly adopted during rearchitecting?
Modern approaches often involve microservices, event-driven architecture, serverless, containerised deployments, and API-first designs.
What role does DevOps play in rearchitecting?
DevOps is crucial for automation, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and rapid, iterative releases, which support the flexibility of new architectures.
How long does a typical rearchitecting project take?
Depending on the size and complexity, projects can take from several months to a year or more, especially if performed incrementally for risk control and business continuity.
How do you manage data during rearchitecting?
Data management involves planning for migration, ensuring consistency, minimising downtime, and sometimes transforming the data model to match the new architecture.
Can rearchitecting be done incrementally?
Yes, and this is often recommended. Strangler pattern and modular decomposition allow organisations to rearchitect parts of the system without shutting down the whole application.
Assure seamless migration to cloud environments, improve performance, and handle increasing demands efficiently.
Modernisations of legacy systems refer to the process of upgrading or replacing outdated legacy systems to align with contemporary business requirements and technological advances.
