By: Biswanath Giri, Associate Principal - Architecture

As organizations pursue application modernization to further their digital transformation objectives, API-first approaches can help them maximize the ROI on their effort. See how Apigee Integration can help you realize that value.

In today’s digital economy, enterprises that continue to operate with legacy applications in their portfolios are sitting on a wealth of opportunity. With application modernization, they can unleash new value streams, attain a competitive edge, and derive greater value from these legacy application portfolios.

However, re-architecting legacy applications is not possible within a short time frame. It takes significant time and effort and requires enterprise and application architects to carefully weigh critical decisions. At the same time, businesses need to roll out new experiences within weeks to compete with their digitally native peers and win in the market. Because legacy applications often house critical data and services, they may be the key to building a new experience.

This is where organizations look for the fast lane of application modernization. By leveraging APIs, they can enable new experiences on top of legacy applications that are still in the process of modernization. See how Google Apigee Integration complements application modernization and enables higher RoI along the modernization pathway.

Understanding application modernization

Over time, legacy applications accrue technical debt. They may be unable to keep up with the evolving needs of users or may cost too much to operate or maintain compared to newer architectures. For example, a monolithic application could be a candidate for migrating to the cloud. However, in its current state, it might be unable to exploit the granular and boundless scalability of the cloud platform. This is because it was not built for that purpose in an on-prem world.

Such applications fail to meet business objectives efficiently and must be updated or improved. Application modernization will typically address those issues, enabling businesses to ensure their applications remain relevant in an ever-evolving digital ecosystem. For example, consider a legacy application that was serving physical stores. When this app is also made to serve the front end of a new mobile e-commerce app, it may not scale well enough. Modernization enables enterprises to extend the returns on investments made in these applications.

Because rearchitecting applications may take significant effort and investments, API-based approaches to modernization enable businesses to capture the low-hanging fruit. They help expose critical services as endpoints and enable frontends to consume data or processing logic and bring new experiences to life. Such an approach requires strong API management capabilities built on scalable foundations.

Enter Apigee Integration

Apigee Integration is a platform that offers enterprise-scale API integration and management capabilities. Built atop Google Cloud foundations, Apigee Integration enables application modernization at the speed of business. It solves some key challenges afflicting organizations pursuing application modernization and accelerates value extraction from legacy applications.

Apigee Integration takes a business-aware approach to API integration and management. It lets users integrate applications with APIs by creating connectors using a drag-and-drop interface. It also helps manage and monitor existing APIs and handle complex integration logic natively within the same interface.

Apigee Integration: key benefits

These features prove specifically valuable to organizations that are in the process of modernizing their application portfolios. Why? Because such organizations operate within legacy IT frameworks, where silos lead to duplication, and applications constitute the core product instead of its constituent services. Apigee Integration frames APIs as a product and helps nurture an API product mindset within teams. As a result, it forms a bridge to a full-fledged microservices-based architecture and enables ownership of smaller pieces of code that serve a narrow but defined business purpose.

Here are some of the key benefits of Apigee Integration for application modernization:

1. Democratize API integration: Apigee Integration offers a drag-and-drop interface with prebuilt connectors for popular enterprise applications and backends. This enables business users to expose legacy applications to new business services without relying on developers.
2. Ease change management: By offering integration and management capabilities within the same intuitive interface, Apigee Integration reduces platform fatigue for users during turbulent transformation projects.
3. Deduplication of effort: Supporting API documentation and management in a single platform, Apigee Integration prevents duplication of effort and lets users quickly discover pre-built connectors for their use case.
4. Faster time-to-market: Apigee Integration enables businesses to rapidly expose critical data or logic of legacy apps to new services, increasing the pace for activating new products and services.
5. Scalable foundations: APIs built on Apigee Integration can accommodate enterprise-scale traffic and latency requirements, thereby preserving the relevance of integrations and demand scales.

In sum, Apigee Integration brings consistency to API integration projects and can help businesses methodically expose legacy applications. This speeds the development of modern experiences while maintaining visibility into the usage of data and applications.

Application modernization with Apigee Integration: tips and best practices

To maximize the benefits of Apigee Integration in application modernization, it is essential to define guardrails and enable a developer-friendly API ecosystem from the get-go. Here are some best practices in this direction.

Building velocity in your modernization program

1. Define and enforce an API lifecycle management process and establish a frequency to review and update APIs to meet changing business requirements.
2. It is important to achieve consistency in API design – ensure that everyone abides by industry standards for naming, versioning, and documentation to avoid confusion as the number of services grows over the course of modernization. It is common to have over 10,000 APIs in the portfolio, so consistency is critical for efficient management.
3. To accelerate the development of new experiences with APIs, the developers can quickly understand and implement the APIs. Use a developer portal that offers self-service and sandbox environments to speed and ease consumer uptake.
4. DevOps teams must aim to integrate Apigee Integration into the CI/CD pipeline over time, to automate deployment and updating. This can significantly lower maintenance overheads as the API volume grows.

Ensuring API performance and security

1. Use Apigee Integration’s native security features like OAuth and API key validation to create secure-by-design APIs.
2.  Deploy rate-limiting measures to ensure your core legacy applications are isolated from DoS exploits.
3. Legacy backend systems will not be able to scale to high demand. Use caching strategies to mitigate or offset the load and improve the response times.
4. Keep APIs optimized for the amount of traffic they are expected to handle – if they cater to different geographical locations, use multi-region deployments.

Summing it up

Application modernization is a vital aspect of every digital transformation initiative today. Considering that legacy applications hold critical data that is essential to activating new experiences and apps, API-based modernization strategies can switch modernization initiatives to the fast lane.

However, this requires strong API integration and management capabilities to enable organizations to adopt an API product approach. This not only serves as a stepping stone to a microservices-based architecture but also breaks silos and establishes integration as a shared activity that can be leveraged across the organization.

Apigee Integration enables businesses to achieve these outcomes and provides native management and security capabilities in an enterprise-scale platform. With Apigee Integration, organizations can maximize the ROI on their application modernization initiatives and start realizing value with new products faster.

Start realizing the ROI on your modernization efforts using Apigee Integration with LTI Mindtree – write to us at info@ltimindtree.com, or visit www.ltimindtree.com to learn more.