05 · Application Modernisation
The application is the reason the cloud bill exists.
Lifting a monolith onto cloud infrastructure gets you the same application with a worse bill. We modernise the thing itself — decomposed where decomposition pays, instrumented so you can see it, and built to scale down as readily as up.
Who this is for
If two or more of these describe you, we should talk.
- Organisations that completed a lift-and-shift and did not get the savings they were promised.
- Teams whose release cadence is limited by the architecture, not by the people.
- Applications that cost the same at 3am as at midday because nothing scales down.
- Anyone maintaining a system where one change requires testing everything.
What's included
What Application Modernisation covers — 6 capabilities, all of them visible.
Nothing hidden behind a click. If we can’t describe it plainly here, we shouldn’t be charging you for it.
Modernisation assessment
Portfolio analysis and a disposition per application, including the honest recommendation to leave some of them exactly as they are. Not everything deserves to be modernised.
- Portfolio analysis
- 7 Rs disposition
- Effort/impact scoring
Cloud-native architecture
Managed services in preference to self-hosted, event-driven where it genuinely fits, and serverless where the economics actually work rather than because it is fashionable.
- Managed services
- Event-driven
- Serverless
- Cost-aware design
Microservices & APIs
Domain decomposition done against real boundaries, API design and gateway strategy, and strangler-fig migration paths so the old system keeps running while the new one grows around it.
- Domain decomposition
- API design
- Gateway strategy
- Strangler fig
Data layer
Database selection and migration, caching strategy, read scaling, and schema evolution that does not require downtime — usually the hardest part of any modernisation and the part most plans underestimate.
- Database migration
- Caching
- Read replicas
- Zero-downtime schema change
Front-end
Responsive, accessible interfaces with a performance budget that is enforced in the pipeline rather than measured after launch.
- Responsive
- WCAG accessibility
- Performance budgets
- Core Web Vitals
Application observability
Distributed tracing, real user monitoring, error tracking, and service level objectives set on the user journeys that matter rather than on every endpoint equally.
- Distributed tracing
- Real user monitoring
- Error tracking
- Journey SLOs
A modernisation assessment.
Seen enough? This is the smallest way to start.
Often bought alongside
Platform Engineering & DevOps
The platform layer your product team keeps rebuilding badly: infrastructure as code, pipelines that deploy safely, Kubernetes that upgrades on schedule, observability that answers questions.
Explore02Agentic AI Operations
Supervised AI agents that collapse alert storms into one incident, trace the cause, and execute the fix — inside limits you define. Every action scoped, logged and reversible.
ExploreNext step
A modernisation assessment.
Two to three weeks across your application portfolio, ending in a disposition per application with effort, impact and expected running cost — so the business case is made before the first line of code.