Running Application Modernization Assessments with LTI Infinity AppLens

By Austin Sequeira, Head of Cloud Innovation – LTI
By Lewis Tang, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS

LTI

For many organizations, the cloud is considered a key enabler to purposeful digital transformations. Enterprises in particular are working out the right cloud adoption strategies and formulating a migration and modernization roadmap through application discovery and analysis.

A common starting point is performing an inventory check to identify which applications are potential candidates for the move to cloud. Application rationalization is the next step to aligning cloud strategies with business objectives.

An assessment outlines which applications are suitable to move to the cloud and helps segregate and prioritize applications for modernization. It also detects potential interruptions or vulnerabilities, if any, and ensures maximum visibility into the current landscape.

The process of moving applications, data, and infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with minimal impact on operational continuity, low risk, and reduced cost is the key to a well-defined migration strategy. Based on application discovery, portfolios are assessed to determine their cloud readiness and disposition to effect agile, scalable, and cost-effective cloud implementations.

Cloud consulting services from Larsen and Toubro Infotech (LTI) comprise of assessment templates, tools, methodologies, and best practices that enable enterprises to design a right-fit cloud migration and modernization strategy. LTI is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with the Migration Consulting Competency.

LTI’s Infinity AppLens is a re-engineering assistant solution that identifies complexities and assesses the cloud readiness of application portfolios to coin an efficient cloud modernization roadmap.

In this post, we will see how Infinity AppLens analyzes and highlights the challenges associated with the current application ecosystem and provides cloud-first recommendations to enhance business outcomes.

Challenges

Following are key challenges for many enterprises striving to realize the full value of cloud:

• Lack of a well-defined modernization strategy: Zero or minimal understanding and planning of how legacy, on-premises, or existing cloud applications need to be moved to a newer technology stack.
• Unanticipated costs: Moving to cloud can sometimes be initially expensive, and if potential financial impact is not determined beforehand it can lead to long-term monetary risks and unforeseen expenses.
• Understanding dependencies: Enterprise teams often work in silos, having limited view and understanding of interconnected components while building applications. Due to the absence of practices that map and manage application, tool, platform, and server dependencies, migrating to the cloud can be complicated.
• Lack of visibility: Many enterprises are unable to track issues or changes associated with the application portfolio. The lack of a holistic viewpoint from a cloud modernization perspective can make it difficult for enterprises to take informed decisions.
• Inadequate cloud expertise: Lack of training, knowledge, best practices, and certified cloud architects can lead to a shortage of skilled cloud resources.

Infinity AppLens Solution Overview

Infinity AppLens is a cloud-agnostic solution that enables enterprises to assess their application’s cloud compatibility and readiness by devising action-oriented migration and modernization strategies through the 6R disposition approach (Rehost, Refactor, Replatform, Repurchase, Retain, Retire).

The solution helps build a future-state architecture blueprint, create a modernization roadmap, and provide total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis for significant cost benefits.

Infinity AppLens analyzes application portfolios, reports incompatibilities, administers code quality checks to minimize technical debts, and provides suitable cloud-fit recommendations and strategies to enable effective cloud transformations.

Key Features

Infinity AppLens is comprised of two modules—Infinity AppLens Scanner and Infinity AppLens Analyzer.

Infinity AppLens Scanner

Infinity AppLens Scanner conducts non-intrusive, deep source code analysis using 250+ customizable cloud-native patterns across technologies such as Java, .NET, and Python. It helps identify technical debt by determining compliance with code quality best practices. The scanner also highlights application dependencies and third-party library incompatibilities.

One of the key differentiators is the mono-to-micro advisory that recommends which monolith applications can be transformed into microservices.

Infinity AppLens Analyzer

Infinity AppLens analyzer is the cognitive engine within Infinity AppLens that translates raw data derived from the scanner into actionable insights. Business intelligence-driven data analysis provides visibility into anomalies and generates in-depth assessment reports.

These reports list down identified application migration and modernization complexities and provide end-to-end visibility on security, compliance, and resilience to map out a right-fit cloud disposition strategy.

Benefits of Infinity AppLens

As assessment strategies are a crucial factor for cloud modernization, it’s important for enterprises to gain in-depth insights and recommendations on cloud migration feasibility, readiness, and plan before formulating a well-defined modernization roadmap.

LTI’s Infinity AppLens enables clients to experience faster, simpler, and exceedingly accurate application assessments via automated assessment techniques. The solution puts together a template-based model that accelerates application portfolio assessments. It helps build a robust disposition strategy and significantly reduces cloud modernization time and efforts.

How it Works

Infinity AppLens is deployed onto the client environment, wherein the scanner module scans the client’s application source code to identify anomalies.

Additionally, subject matter experts (SMEs) work with application owners through workshops, surveys, reference documents, and artifacts to discover subjective business data such as business criticalities, complexities, and domain dependencies.

The output from both the scanner and SME analysis are fed to a cognitive engine for data correlation and generation of in-depth assessment reports, summaries, and recommendations.

Figure 1 – How LTI Infinity AppLens works.

Infinity AppLens architecture components include:

• AWS subscription: The solution is hosted on the customer’s AWS account with all access control/privileges maintained per their security compliance guidelines.
• AWS region: The solution will be deployed per the customer’s preferred AWS region.
• Virtual private cloud: The solution will be deployed per the customer’s allocated virtual private (VPC) network.
• AWS Availability Zones: The solution is hosted in a single AWS Availability Zone (AZ) environment due to its functional usage for non-business critical purposes.
• Application containers: The user interface (UI) and service APIs of the Analyzer module within the solution are deployed as containers.
• AWS IAM: Fine-grained access control using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) with least privilege policy per customer’s security guideline.

Figure 2 – Infinity AppLens architecture.

The two modules of Infinity AppLens—Scanner and Analyzer—are packaged as individual executables and installed on a Windows machine per the deployment prerequisites mentioned below.

All of the runtime dependencies required for the Scanner and Analyzer are pre-built within the packages. The deployment approximately takes 1-2 hours provided all the prerequisites are fulfilled.

Getting Started with Infinity AppLens

You can get started with Infinity AppLens for application assessment by following the below steps:

• Resource provisioning: Provision the following resource within the client AWS account – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance with configuration as 64bit Windows, 4 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, 500GB Standard SSD.
• Network port requirements for the above resource provisioned: Port 443, 8080 – HTTPS, Tomcat server.
• Install Infinity AppLens: To install and execute Infinity AppLens, you’ll have to connect with LTI cloud consultants. You can reach out to the LTI team at  infinitycloud@lntinfotech.com.

Summary

In this post, we focused on how compelling it is for enterprises to devise the right cloud assessment and disposition strategy.

Designing a modernization roadmap through application discovery and assessment is the first step in determining successful cloud transformations. Enterprises need solutions that can facilitate and accelerate a thorough assessment of application portfolios to determine what can and cannot be moved to the cloud from an industry, cost, technology and compliance point of view.

LTI’s Infinity AppLens is a solution that effectively analyzes and evaluates applications to furnish in-depth assessment reports and recommendations to map out a right-fit cloud migration and modernization roadmap.

You can get started with Infinity AppLens to boost your application migration and modernization journey by visiting the LTI Infinity product page.

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LTI is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and global technology consulting and digital solutions company helping more than 400 clients succeed in a converging world.

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