Rehosting is the right choice for organizations that process high-sensitive data and are limited with the capabilities of their current software. Application rehosting is all about redeploying your current application logic on a new, modern platform. After rehosting, your core infrastructure remains the same, but you can make use of your consumption-based elastic resources in the cloud. Let’s see how it works.
Rehost meaning
In simple words, digital transformation: rehosting is the process of migrating your business applications that are hosted on data center environments to the cloud while retaining the same functionality. With rehosting, organizations can move to the cloud without the necessity to redesign their infrastructure and change some product features. However, before migrating your application to the cloud, you should be aware of your business goals, capacities of your application, and digital transformation rehosting software, and the costs of migration to avoid the following risks:
- A desire to make drastic changes and large alterations to the application rehosting AWS if there is no business value or necessity in it
- Ignoring the requirements of the applications may lead to app collapse
- Taking on the rehosting process too quickly without analyzing if your application is tailored to the new infrastructure or environment
- Thinking that rehosting can substitute full advantages of the public cloud platform
Before choosing whether to rehost or not, you should analyze the following AWS replatform steps and components:
- Make sure you have set goals and an executive sponsor
- Understanding why you are going to migrate to the cloud and what benefits it will bring to your business
- Define the impact of rehosting on your business and set realistic goals you expect from the chosen approach
Rehosting in digital transformation process: Main benefits
The main benefit of rehosting is that it’s a safe and cost-effective modernization of your current application. It will help you to unlock the value of your core business systems, reduce your costs and optimize your business efficiency. Also, it will help you launch new functionality faster.
So let’s see what other benefits does rehost brings to your business.
- As you don’t change your functionality and don’t make major development, rehost stays one of the most cost-effective ways to scale your business
- You don’t need to employ any costly development and testing, so applications are rehosted to the cloud with no changes in the code and infrastructure
- The same is about architecture. Event management, architecture, and monitoring ports are not affected by rehosting
- Rehosting is scalable, which means you can move to other workloads as your project grows
- Rehosting has cloud-native functionality like auto-scaling, managed storage and data processing services, infrastructure as code (IaC), and more.
“Rehosting is often the starting point for migration to the cloud, but often (once cloud benefits are experienced) an expansion to Re-architecting strategy occurs given its long-term advantages and benefits.”
— Oleksandr Vorobiov, DevOps Lead, AWS Cloud Architect at SoftServe.
According to the statistics, here is what happens after rehosting:
- Application performance gains of up to 75%
- Cost savings of up to 90%
- Development productivity gains of up 30%
- A proven pathway towards attracting next-generation skills
According to Flexera’s report, 62% of enterprises have seen a little more than the planned increase in cloud usage. Similarly, 52% of small businesses also saw more cloud usage than they had intended.
The main use cases and replatform migration steps for rehosting usually are the following:
- Evacuation of data center or termination of the service provider
- Migration of a large chunk of applications in a short time
- The skillset of in-house staff aligning with a strategy like rehost rather than replatform or refactoring
- If you have commercial-off-the-shelf applications to migrate
- No need to make changes in the codebase for migrations of applications
- Maintenance of legacy black box systems for your organization that can be migrated directly to cloud services
Rehosting is a great choice if you are not into multiple cloud migration strategies and complex cloud adoptions. With refactoring, you don’t have to deal with the complexity of refactoring systems. So, when choosing rehost you don’t have to untangle the ins and outs of various migration strategies.
Rehost vs Replatform: What’s the difference
Let’s learn more about digital transformation rehosting vs replatforming. Replatforming is a process of migrating a company’s assets to the cloud while changing or optimizing a certain portion of the application. Even if a small part of the application is optimized for the cloud, it can lead to significant benefits. Replatform involves the use of containers and VMs and changes application code if needed to use base platform services.
Replatform is something in the middle between rehosting and refactoring. With replatform, companies can enjoy the advantages of native cloud functionality and optimize business efficiency without spending resources for refactoring. During this approach, developers use the resources they are used to working with, such as development frameworks and legacy programming languages. Replatform is usually slower than rehosting and doesn’t include a lot of benefits as refactoring does.
Choose this approach if you want more cloud benefits, and you are not afraid of minor changes to your application’s functioning. Replatform in AWS includes slight modifications to certain parts of your application to harness the features in the cloud.
When should you use rehost vs replatform?
- If you are confident that minor changes won’t affect the application’s functioning
- If you want to automate certain tasks before moving databases to the Amazon Relational Database Service
- If you want to leverage more cloud benefits other than just moving the application to the cloud
- If for moving an application to the cloud, the source environment is not supporting the cloud
- If you need to automate tasks that are essentials to operations, but business is not prioritizing them
“Refactor involves a more advanced process of rearchitecting and often recoding some portion of an existing application to take advantage of cloud-native frameworks and functionality. This approach is the most time-consuming and resource-intensive, yet it can offer the lowest monthly spend of the three approaches. Organizations that refactor are able to modify their applications and infrastructure to take full advantage of cloud-native features and to maximize operational cost efficiency in the cloud.”
— Aater Suleman, CEO and Co-Founder at Flux7, an IT consultancy providing DevOps consulting, cloud architecture, and migration services.
When to start rehosting
Start rehosting when you have identified your main goals and answered the following questions and AWS replatform migration steps:
- How strategically important is this application to the business? Is it a product that is related to revenue and should be invested in or an application necessary for business and hence should be sustained? This is important because migrations often require a lot of time and budget, and it’s better to invest the energy required to replatform/refactor in invest applications rather than sustain applications.
- If your application is sustained, is it even possible to rehost it? Are all technologies even runnable in the cloud? If yes, rehosting is the best option. If not, you should look for a SaaS alternative.
- Invest applications require a cost-benefit analysis. You should understand the cost in terms of development resources and any business interruptions during a significant rewrite.
- Also to be considered are the benefits of refactoring, which must be computed through careful analysis. If the benefits outweigh the cost and the direction is achievable within the constraints, refactoring is the right choice. Due to these constraints, companies often refactor a very small fraction (less than 10%) of their portfolio.
“When planning rehosting, it’s important to analyze organizational goals and the workloads that support them to those cloud features that will help further those goals. Only a detailed analysis can help the organization create a solid migration plan that meets its short- and long-term business objectives.”
— Vlad Medvedovsky, CEO at Proxet (ex - Rails Reactor) - a custom software development company.
Proxet rehosting experience
Proxet provides digital transformation services to organizations of any size who want to scale their business. Our team provides fundamental changes to organizations and institutions through an integration of digital technologies. To remain competitive in the ever-changing world of emerging innovations, both traditional and modern companies need to have a digital transformation roadmap. It helps businesses adjust their processes and offers to the current market demands.
Your digital transformation rehosting gan solutions feature clear business process automation, maximized efficiency, and expense reduction. We automate the key tasks and streamline the processes to minimize the number of time-consuming and error-prone manual steps and ensure smooth customer engagements.
Here’s how our strategy looks like:
- Rehosting. Using the IaaS environment.
- Refactoring. Using PaaS, making use of familiar languages and frameworks.
- Revising. Changing an existing codebase for cloud adoption.
- Rebuilding. Rearchitecting the applications for a new selected framework.
Contact us right now, and let’s discuss how to take your business to the next level.
