# Phases of the modernization process
Phases

 Modernizing your applications to meet customer demands and to take advantage of the changing technology landscape is critical to maintaining your organization’s competitive advantage and market share. A key strategy to meeting these business demands is to deliver both continued use and real value by converting aging applications to more modern architectures. Having a comprehensive understanding of the application’s details and its interrelationships with other systems is a critical step in performing application modernization.

The AWS approach to application modernization is iterative, and can be divided into three high-level phases—assess, modernize, and manage—as illustrated in the following diagram. 

 ![\[Phases of the application modernization process\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/strategy-modernizing-applications/images/modernization-phases.png) 

The following sections discuss each phase in detail.

**Topics**
+ [

# Assess
](assess.md)
+ [

# Modernize
](modernize.md)
+ [

# Manage
](manage.md)

# Assess


The first step in an organization’s modernization journey is to analyze the existing application portfolio, assess the systems that need to be modernized, and identify the technical solutions required for application modernization. In this phase, you can use the [application modernization questionnaire](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/modernization-assessing-applications/questionnaire.html) to assess and rationalize the applications portfolio and determine the business, functional, technical and financial significance (the strategic value) of applications in the portfolio. This will determine how well the organization can support the future state architecture, when it’s built.

**Activities**
+ Assess applications through five lenses:
  + Strategic or business fit
  + Functional adequacy
  + Technical adequacy
  + Financial fit
  + Digital readiness
+ Group, rank, and sequence applications.
+ Document target and interim operating models.
+ Understand key technology and regulatory requirements.
+ Determine applications that need extensive data migration.
+ Clarify the scope and volume of data to be converted.

**Outcomes**
+ Application modernization blueprint
+ Technical and functional architecture for the target state for one or two applications
  + Strategic or business fit
  + Functional adequacy
  + Technical adequacy
  + Financial fit
  + Digital readiness

**How-to guide**
+ [Evaluating modernization readiness for applications in the AWS Cloud](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/modernization-assessing-applications/)

# Modernize


During this phase, you determine project goals and resource requirements, and you build out the implementation roadmap. The goal is to revitalize your applications by using a modernization program that creates a modern, agile application architecture. 

**Activities**
+ Determine the milestones for converting your applications’ source code and data.
+ Complete the mapping of all operational areas to ensure that required standards and procedures for operating and administering the new target environment are addressed.
+ Implement an infrastructure solution that can address your reliability, accessibility, and growth requirements by using cloud-native approaches and best-of-breed languages and frameworks. The components of a modernized application have these characteristics:
  + Packaged as lightweight containers
  + Designed as loosely coupled microservices
  + Centered around APIs for interaction and collaboration
  + Architected with a clean separation of stateless and stateful services
  + Isolated from server and operating system dependencies
  + Deployed on self-service, elastic, cloud infrastructure
  + Managed through agile DevOps processes
  + Include automated capabilities
  + Provide defined, policy-driven resource allocation

**Outcomes**
+ Target state data model design
+ Organizational readiness built though training and tool improvements (change management and operational model)
+ Regular cadence established for change activities
+ Refined operating model and measurement of delivery effectiveness
+ Key business case metrics, which are tracked and reported for value delivered
+ Continuation of refinement and automation activities
+ A modernization roadmap that defines the strategy that is applied to each application and how it can scale
+ Preparation and implementation of modernization, including iterative testing deliveries that are synchronized with the new application roadmap

**Example**

The following diagram shows modernization options for legacy Windows applications.

 ![\[Phases of the application modernization process\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/strategy-modernizing-applications/images/modernization-windows-apps.png) 

**How-to guide**
+ [Phased approach to modernizing applications in the AWS Cloud](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/modernization-phased-approach/)

# Manage


Relearning efforts are embedded in all modernization activities, to give you a detailed understanding of application characteristics and to reduce any risks that might be caused by subsequent modernization efforts. Application workloads still need to be able to exploit platform services so that application teams can understand and optimize the runtime characteristics of their application workloads. This means that application teams should treat the operational features of modernized applications like all other application features, and microservice operations effectively become part of engineering. Embracing this DevOps culture in cloud-native operations, as part of building a site reliability engineering (SRE) capability in the organization, is essential to successful modernization adoption. The management phase includes all the elements of effective change management, program management, quality assurance, and service excellence.

**How-to guide**
+ [Modernizing operations in the AWS Cloud](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/migration-operations-integration/)