Accelerating Your Modernization Journey with EBA: How AWS ModAx Transforms Legacy Applications

“Organizations that successfully modernize achieve 42% faster IT resource provisioning and an 86% increase in weekly feature deployments.” – AWS Business Value of Cloud Modernization Study, March 2025

Other benefits of modernization include:

• 130% more databases managed per administrator after adopting Managed Databases
• 17% faster time to insights after adopting Managed Analytics
• 83% increase in DevOps automation after adopting Modern DevOps practices
• 25% faster time to resolve downtime incidents after adopting Open-Source platforms

Many organizations recognize the need to modernize but find taking the first step challenging. The barriers are common: legacy systems weighed down by technical debt, obsolete programming languages, missing documentation, and rigid architectures. While these obstacles can make modernization appear overwhelming, delaying these essential updates only increases future challenges.

Why Consider Modernization Experience Based Acceleration (ModAx) for Legacy Applications?

At AWS, Modernization Experience-Based Acceleration, or ModAx EBAs, has helped hundreds of organizations rapidly achieve their modernization goals. Customers have reported that modernization delivers value across all dimensions of the AWS Cloud Value Framework. Organizations can optimize spending through pay-per-use serverless architectures and right-sized resources. Staff productivity improves as teams spend less time maintaining legacy systems and more time innovating with modern, manageable technology stacks. Applications become more resilient as they move from monolithic structures with multiple failure points to microservices-based architectures with built-in redundancy. Most importantly, business agility increases as organizations can respond faster to market changes and customer needs, deploying new features in hours rather than months.

Banking Customer: Using the collaborative ModAx approach over 3 days, a banking customer assisted by AWS experts slashed operational costs by 60% and reduced deployment times from weeks to minutes by modernizing their million-dollar monolithic application into microservices.

Healthcare Company: Over a 3-day ModAx engagement, a healthcare company assisted by AWS experts reduced costs and improved application performance by 30% while achieving real-time updates (down from 48 hours) by refactoring their platform with Amazon Aurora and DynamoDB to handle post-pandemic booking volumes.

ModAx Journey – Enablement, Infrastructure Preparation, Modernization Delivery

The ModAx journey takes AWS customers through the complete modernization process, from application selection to delivering modernization outcomes. Each ModAx journey is customized based on an organization’s needs. A typical ModAx engagement takes 5-6 weeks, with each week focusing on a specific aspect of the modernization framework:

• Week 1: ModAx Assessment and Cadence Establishment Evaluate application architecture, testing practices, security requirements, storage needs, DevOps culture, CI/CD pipelines, deployment methodologies, and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Week 2: Future State Architecture Design Collaborate with AWS experts to design a modernized architecture that aligns with your business goals and leverages appropriate AWS services.
• Week 3: Assembling ModAx Participants and Assigning Roles Identify key stakeholders and team members, assigning specific responsibilities for the modernization process. AWS can provide additional technical enablement sessions as needed to support engagement success.
• Week 4-5: ModAx Mobilization – Expectation Setting Conduct prescriptive training aligned to the modernization pathways being used to prepare teams for the EBA.
• Week 5-6: 3-Day ModAx EBA An Immersive, hands-on modernization work with AWS experts to achieve tangible outcomes and build modernization capabilities within your team.

Seven Modernization Pathways

ModAx brings AWS expertise to help your organization create sustainable patterns for achieving modernization outcomes. Unlike PoC-focused programs, ModAx works directly with your current modernization backlog, delivering tangible outcomes while building your team’s modernization capabilities to continue progress independently post-engagement.

Figure 1: ModAx Modernization Pathways

ModAx offers seven proven technical pathways, each designed for specific modernization outcomes:

• Move to Cloud Native: Transform monoliths into microservices for enhanced agility and scalability
• Move to Containers: Package applications for consistent, rapid deployment across environments
• Move to Managed Databases: Leverage purpose-built AWS databases for distributed applications
• Move to Open Source: Transition from proprietary systems to flexible, cost-effective alternatives
• Move to Managed Analytics: Enable data-driven decisions with advanced analytics capabilities
• Move to Modern DevOps: Accelerate development cycles with AI/ML-enhanced collaboration
• Move to AI: Enhance applications with intelligent capabilities for next-generation functionality

While these pathways provide the strategic framework for modernization, AWS’s Generative AI capabilities supercharge the execution, helping teams overcome the technical complexities that traditionally slow down transformation efforts.

Accelerating ModAx with GenAI

As organizations progress through their ModAx journey, AWS’s Generative AI capabilities provide powerful acceleration tools that directly address the common modernization challenges mentioned earlier. These AI-powered solutions work seamlessly with the ModAx framework to tackle technical debt, decipher outdated languages, compensate for poor documentation, and transform inflexible architectures.

Amazon Q Developer serves as an AI-powered modernization partner throughout the ModAx journey, directly addressing legacy system challenges. It excels at untangling and documenting complex code, generating comprehensive README files and data-flow diagrams that transform weeks of manual discovery into days of AI-assisted analysis. During assessments and architecture design, Q Developer performs real-time code reviews, identifies obsolete patterns, catches bugs and security vulnerabilities, and recommends modern patterns aligned with AWS best practices—helping teams break free from accumulated technical debt and poor documentation that plague legacy systems.

AWS Transform provides an Agentic AI-powered modernization engine designed for transformations during the ModAx EBA. It specializes in modernizing legacy systems like IBM z/OS to AWS, migrating VMware workloads to Amazon EC2, and transforming .NET applications to open source, Linux-ready solutions. Most importantly, Transform helps decompose monolithic applications into microservices by analyzing dependencies, identifying natural service boundaries, and recommending decomposition strategies based on 19 years of AWS migration expertise.

How to Select an Application for ModAx

Choosing the right application for ModAx requires evaluating both business value and technical readiness. Success comes from finding that sweet spot—applications that offer meaningful benefits without overwhelming risk.

Business Indicators for ModAx Selection: Choose applications that balance meaningful business impact with manageable risk and start with low-to-medium-risk systems to build modernization muscles before tackling critical ones. The best candidates are proprietary, custom-built applications with clear modernization ROI through cost savings or revenue opportunities, stable enough to run well today but limiting tomorrow’s growth. Focus on applications whose modernization patterns can be reused across your portfolio to multiply value. Avoid commercial off-the-shelf software, systems retiring within 18 months, or applications without clear ownership and dedicated teams.

Technical Indicators for ModAx Selection: Seek applications that share technology patterns with others in your portfolio to maximize learning value, with complexity that challenges without overwhelming your team. Well-defined interfaces and clear boundaries enable incremental modernization, while sufficient team familiarity with the codebase ensures confident execution. Avoid applications in constant crisis mode that need stabilization first, those frozen by compliance audits or regulatory changes, and systems with overwhelming technical debt. The sweet spot combines technical readiness with reusable patterns that can accelerate modernization across your entire application landscape.

Get started with ModAx

Ready to get started on your modernization journey? Get in touch with your AWS account team to learn more about ModAx and how it can help you accelerate your cloud journey. New to the cloud? Contact AWS Sales to get started with transforming your business.