As a manager, you are likely to run into discussions about application management. Perhaps you have applications that need updates but you do not have enough developers for it? Or perhaps the original developers are no longer available and the tech stack is so out of date that you are not sure on how to keep maintaining it? Worst case scenario you are stuck in the sunken cost fallacy…this application has already cost us X amount of money, we cannot modernize it because that would mean that all of that money was invested for nothing. Best case scenario you have an application that just works and requires no significant maintenance. Regardless of your situation, you should evaluate your applications to ensure that they keep running smoothly even in the future in the most cost-effective way possible.

If you're a decision-maker looking to make informed IT investment choices without getting lost in too much technical jargon, this guide is for you.

What Are Legacy Applications?

Just to be clear what we really are talking about here: legacy applications are older software programs that have been around for a while, often many years. Think of them as the reliable, old machines in a factory – they still work, but they might not be as efficient or flexible as newer models. These applications often run on outdated hardware, software, and sometimes older languages, making them harder to maintain and less compatible with modern technology.

Why Modernize Legacy Applications?

Modernizing legacy applications is like giving your old factory machines an upgrade. Here’s why it’s important:

1. Cost Savings: Older systems can be expensive to maintain. Modern applications, especially those on the cloud, can reduce costs.
2. Improved Performance: Newer systems can handle more tasks faster and more efficiently.
3. Better Security: Modern applications have up-to-date security features to protect against new threats.
4. Scalability: Cloud-based systems can easily grow with your business, handling increased workloads without a hitch.
5. Peace of mind: Knowing that your applications are maintained and manageable means that you can focus on adding functionality or optimizing performance instead of just keeping them alive if you wish.

What Is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving your applications, data, and other business elements from on-premises hardware (like your company’s servers) to the cloud (remote servers managed by cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP).

Think of it as moving from a crowded, cluttered office to a new, spacious one that’s managed by experts.

Steps to Cloud Migration

1. Assessment: Evaluate your current applications. Identify which ones are critical, which need an upgrade, and which can be retired.
2. Planning: Develop a migration strategy. Decide whether you’ll move everything at once or in phases.
3. Choosing a Cloud Provider: Select a cloud service provider that meets your business needs. Consider factors like cost, features, and support.
4. Migration: Move your applications and data to the cloud. This can be done in several ways, such as:
   • Rehosting: Simply moving applications to the cloud without making changes (like a "lift and shift").
   • Replatforming: Making a few cloud optimizations to achieve benefits without changing the core architecture.
   • Refactoring: Redesigning applications to better suit the cloud environment.
5. Testing: Ensure everything works correctly in the new cloud environment.
6. Optimization: Fine-tune your cloud setup for performance and cost-efficiency.

Benefits of Hiring Cloud Consultants

Navigating cloud migration can be complex, but you don’t have to do it alone. Hiring GESHDO consultants can bring several benefits:

1. Expertise: Our consultants bring in-depth knowledge and experience.
2. Efficiency: They can streamline the migration process, saving you time and reducing downtime.
3. Customization: Consultants can tailor solutions to fit your specific business needs.
4. Ongoing Support: Post-migration, they can provide continuous support and optimization.

Making Informed Decisions

As a manager, your role is crucial in making strategic decisions that affect the future of your business. Here are some tips:

1. Ask Questions: Don’t hesitate to ask for explanations in plain language.
2. Evaluate ROI: Consider the return on investment for cloud migration.
3. Understand the Risks: Be aware of potential challenges, such as data security and downtime during migration.
4. Seek Expertise: Rely on the expertise of cloud consultants to guide you through the process.

Conclusion

Modernizing legacy applications through cloud migration can transform your work load, making it more efficient, secure, and scalable. By understanding the basics and leveraging expert help, you can make informed decisions that will drive your business forward.

At GESHDO, we are cloud experts and we can help you optimize time-to-market as well as reduce costs. Embracing the cloud isn't just about technology—it's about setting your business up for success in a digital-first world.

🔗 Curious about how you can develop new solutions using cloud development and DevOps, or perhaps you want some help understanding how you and your company can benefit from the cloud? Reach out to me or one of my colleagues and we will help you turn your vision into reality.

Lets face it: Sitting long hours in front of a computer is not something we can call “natural”. This is not a regular physical activity for the human body and it will cause side effects if you are not careful. If there is anything I would like you to takeaway from this post, it will be this - be aware of this fact and improve your typical daily work flow around it. If you don’t, side effects will start to show themselves.

First of all, I am not a doctor or a physician. I am a programmer spending a lot of hours in front of a computer. What I will be sharing here is practical and simple tips & tools that helped me during my journey.

Tip 1 - Take regular breaks and do mini exercises

I bet you heard about this a lot. But the problem is, it is something very easy to ignore. Setting an alarm on the phone? Believe me I tried, it didn’t worked for me. Specially when I was in the middle of a solution and wanted to keep my focus, it was easy to just snooze or shut off the alarm and put the phone away. When I started to experience problems related to my posture (back, neck, knees, etc.), it was an alarm for me. I didn’t wanted those problems to grow further. I had to find a better solution.

Workrave:

A compact free application that can help you prevent RSI by giving alerts each time you need to take a break. Provides built-in exercises that can be performed when you take a break.

I was amazed by how minimalistic and effective this little software was. It does the job exactly as it is described - nothing less or more. It is uncomparable to setting an alarm on your phone. Because when it is time to take a break, it locks your computer screen. You can still snooze it, but it will keep the popup moving and make an annoying noise. This makes harder to ignore the message, and that’s exactly what I wanted. Now even when I am in the middle of something, taking those breaks doesn’t ruin anything - instead I find myself in a better mode after coming back.

There are 2 types of breaks you can have: longer and mini.

Longer breaks:

They show up with series of exercises you can follow along:

Mini breaks:

Mini breaks are very short ones. When you get the alert, it is good time to leave your chair and walk around a little bit, stretch and come back in a minute.

On top of everything, you can completely customize your experience that can fit into your work flow. How often you will recieve your break times, how long the breaks should be, and so on. Make sure to try this helper if you don’t already!

Get it free from official website: Workrave

Tip 2 - Take care of your wrist by using a vertical orthopedic mouse

It was surprising for me to figure out the fact about classic mouses - it causes your wrist to stay in an unnatural position. I became aware of this when I started to feel tense at my wrist after working day:

As I have figured out, vertical orthopedic mouses were made to prevent this. I ordered one to try out. Result? I still use it since I get it and didn’t had tense feeling at my wrist anymore. To be honest, it was hard to get used to it at least for a week, because it forces you to use your hand in whole different way than you are used to:

If you are experiencing tense feeling at your wrist, you need this. Even you don’t have that problem right now, you can’t go wrong with this. I don’t have any specific brand / model to advice, but the model I use is here:

https://www.trust.com/en/product/22879-verto-ergonomic-wireless-mouse

Tip 3 - Take care of your eyes by using computer glasses with blue light filter

When I started to spend long hours in front of a computer, I haven’t experienced any problem with my eyes. I could stare to the monitor all day long without an issue. By the time I started to experience eye fatigue: dry eyes, redness in the eye, eye twitches and so on. I had to do something to prevent this.

After some research, I figured using computer glasses with blue light filter helped a lot of people. You don’t need a prescription to use them. So I decided to give it a try - and it worked sooner than I expected. Dry eyes, redness and twitches disappeared after a week I started to use them.

If you are experiencing the similar issues, this can help you. Again, I don’t have a specific brand / model to advice, but the one I currently use is here:

https://gunnar.com/product/enigma-assassins-creed-valhalla-edition/

I hope these tips will also help you to prevent RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) and stay sharp on your journey.

Thanks for reading!

I share a bit about experiments with OpenAI's new language prediction model (GPT-3) beta and about it's potential in the future.

OpenAI

OpenAI's GPT-3 is a new language prediction model that has been making waves in the tech community. I've been experimenting with it and I'm impressed with what it can do.
GPT-3 is designed to predict the next word in a sentence, based on the previous words in the sentence. This is similar to how humans learn language. We don't just memorize words, we learn the rules of grammar so that we can generate new sentences.
GPT-3 is different from other language models because it uses a neural network instead of a statistical model. This means that it can learn relationships between words that are not explicitly stated in the training data.
For example, consider the following sentence: "The cat sat on the mat." If you ask GPT-3 to predict the next word, it will correctly predict "." (period). But if you ask it to predict the next two words, it will correctly predict "the mat" (article + noun).

This ability to generalize from limited data is what makes GPT-3 so powerful. It allows us to build models that can learn complex tasks without needing large amounts of training data.
One area where GPT-3 could be particularly useful is natural language processing (NLP). NLP is a field of computer science and artificial intelligence that deals with understanding and generating human language.
Current NLP models are often limited by the amount of training data they have access to. For example, if you want to build a model that can understand medical texts, you need a large corpus of medical texts to train your model on. But this data is often proprietary and difficult to obtain.
With GPT-3, we can train NLP models on much smaller datasets because GPT-3 can learn from very little data. This could open up NLP to a whole new set of applications where data is scarce or proprietary.

Another area where GPT-3 could be useful is building chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversation. They are often used as customer service agents or virtual assistants.
current chatbots are limited by their lack of understanding of human conversation. They often rely on simple keyword matching algorithms which can lead to frustrating conversations for users.
With GPT-3, we can build chatbots that understand human conversation by learning from actual human conversations

What's the catch?

The funny thing here is that I didn't actually write the article - just the summary at the start. Could you spot that it wasn't written by a human?
All I did was to provide some input about the topic with some tags. This was inspired by maraoz so creds to him for the clever idea. I wonder what improvemnets has been made since summer 2020.

There's a few hypothetical uses for this technology and I'm eagerly watching what different kind of services that can be thought up and created.

Taking a look at a few trends for 2022 that's been floating around on the web. I will provide some thoughts on three of these.

Multi-Cloud Environments

Cloud is here to stay and is seeing ever growing adoption by pretty much all industries from tech companies to banking/finance and agriculture.
There is multiple ways you can look at multi-cloud environments. The one I'm going to focus on is running application(s) across multiple public cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP). A business can certainly have a multi-cloud strategy that involves using certain services in AWS and using some in Azure to use the strong points of each public cloud and perhaps spread risk which I find is a sane approach. For example using AzureAD for authentication and hosting your application in GCP cloud run.

Running your application in a multi-cloud environment provides a few challenges.

• Could limit available services you can use
• More difficult to have developers/operations being good at multiple platforms
• Could increase fragmentation
• While avoiding vendor lock is admirable it will probably be more of a hindrance in regards to innovation and technology used
• Increased complexity (especially for troubleshooting)

While I can see compelling reasons to go multi-cloud considering AWS us-east-1 outage, GCP load balancer outage and Azure outage. Unfortunately I couldn't find an official link to the Azure outage but you can search yourselves here. All of these outages had widespread impact of services around the world and some of them could perhaps have been mitigated by a multi-cloud environment.

In most cases it will probably not be worth the extra overhead but I won't deny that there are some cases where it will make sense.
I would propse going with multi-region approach within a cloud vendor. Depending on cost perspectives active-passive and if required active-active.

Serverless

Serverless which actually runs on servers, who would have thought. I don't really think the term makes that much sense but it is here to stay I guess.

Personally I don't really get why I have seen this over and over in posts about trends 2022. Serverless has been around for a while now and is in widespread use across the three major public cloud providers with for example AWS lambda, Azure functions and Google cloud functions.
With increased spending and use of the cloud it doesn't come as a surprise to see serverless being used more. However being a big 'new' trend in 2022?
I don't think so, its here to stay however for the foreseeable future.

No-Code/Low-Code

No-code/low-code is interesting but will 2022 be the year for it to hit big?
Maybe, with products like Google AppSheet, Amazon HoneyCode and Azure Logic Apps at least the big three have services in this area.
While these focus primarily on web/app development this is also where a lot of development happens. This will not replace developers but it might actually lower the barrier of entry into the industry.
One of the big things I see on the horizon is Github copolit which is not really no-code/low-code but it is related. Copilot is really cool and could perhaps reduce the strain on developers. It is a tool which at first glance at least since I haven't been able to try it myself provides actual benefit(s) when coding. It is in technical preview and far from perfect and will probably never be, but humans are also flawed and with a humans it looks like a truly powerful tool

Which the year is near its end I would like to take the opportunity to do a retrospective of the top 3 tech trends at GESHDO during 2021 to see what we want to bring with us into 2022.

Let us jump right into it.

1. Green Cloud Computing

A big trend for the year has been that the cloud providers have started to release numbers of the carbon emissions for the different services they offer.

The numbers were not a big surprise since we already worked under the assumption that cheap and managed is less damaging to the environment than expensive and dedicated.
Since we have been using a cloud-native and serverless-first approach for a couple of years now, the new numbers did not change the way we work, but it's good to get some kind of receipt that our tech choices already aligns with what is best for the environment. During 2022 we expect more providers to release carbon emission data for different services. We hope that it can really push developers and architects to design IT systems that runs as efficient as possible.

Our world deserve that.

2. Hybrid Rendering Frameworks

For a couple of years I have been big fans of using static site generators, such as Hugo to build websites. What we have found out during the year is that there are situations when server-side rendered apps would be a better choice and with progress made on the serverless platforms regarding cold starts and other features we have started to explore hybrid frameworks, such as Next.js.

We will not switch everything over to a hybrid model, but it's always a strength to have another tool in the toolbox when needed to solve our customers problems.

3. True DevOps

This is a quite sensitive heading for my part since I think the word DevOps is the most abused and misused IT word that exists apart from Agile (I'm looking at you SAFe), but what I also can see, is that GESHDO has found a balance between the two camps, dev and ops. A project needs both parts and while unicorns (people that understand both parts in depth) exists and can produce both code and a secure and reliable environment to run the code in, it is not something that can be achieved on every team and customer. Enter our hybrid teams, with both developers and cloud engineers working together. Everyone owns and take responsibility for their specialty of the project, but they still work together as a unit. No more throwing code over the fence and let the ops figure out if this is something that can be deployed in a secure and maintainable way, and no more expectations that each person in the team should do and know two jobs to the cost of one salary.

This is what true DevOps means to us and during 2021 we have and a couple of customer projects where we have had the possibility to prove that the formula works. We are looking forward to 2022 to continue to explore how the perfect project setup looks like and how we can optimize our output for better customer value.

Summary

These are the three big things that we want to take with us from 2021 and implement even better in 2022. Apart from what we bring with us from the current year, I'm also looking forward to finally break some ground in the blockchain space and hopefully GESHDO can deliver its own take on that during next year.

Happy new year, glorious future ahead!

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