DevOps Implementation in Legacy Systems: Mission Impossible or Change in Mindset.

Somebody correctly said, “There are no legacy systems, just legacy thinking.” The fact is there is always resistance to change howsoever smaller the change may be. This is normal human tendency. People always try to compare things with open systems. There is always room for improvement from executers as well as legacy space workers to understand the need for quicker and continuous Integration and continuous Delivery, there needs to be some genuine appreciation of legacy architecture and the need to work in collaboration to achieve the DevOps framework and want to transform the organization to the highest level of automation.

Architectural Constraints

Yes, it’s a hard truth that there are architectural constraints while dealing with legacy systems as they are static and very tightly coupled. We implemented batch jobs and schedulers in our legacy systems. There are many processes in our legacy systems which continue to take long hours and are dependent on various architecture layers. For example, Environment provisioning is dependent and takes a long time in legacy systems. There are constraints which keep the environments dependent on toolchain upgradation and are heavily environment dependent. With no containerization and very poor portability legacy systems are very tough to handle. But the fact of the matter is all these issues are solvable but require a lot of collaboration and the implementers should keep in mind that their changes are making sense keeping the business logic in place.

Toolset Implementation

Implementation of toolset is always difficult to handle in a legacy system, but the key is to understand the needs and modularize the problems. We need to achieve automation in modular level first and then try to achieve complete automation. Step by Step automation and tool chain setup needs to be done by implementers and should take care that each stage makes sense.

Rather than tool first approach or forcing tools on people, the implementers will have to take the path of people first and culture first approach. We will first have to make sure our people understand the needs of the hour and then make sure we create a culture of continuous improvement and then we can embrace the devops framework and ask people to choose from our set of toolset.

How to Achieve CI and CD maturity

For legacy organizations to move to DevOps framework there must be a policy set up and targets needs to be set up to achieve and each target should have a measurable progress. There are some measurable points that are being listed here and are very important for implementers to understand that they should achieve before going live. There are a few reasons why robotized testing is fundamental to ceaselessly conveying an incentive to the client. The first is that computerized tests give an executable of the prerequisites of the application highlight being produced. We know we have composed the correct code, not because it arranges, but rather because it does what the test determines it will do. This early criticism can be at the unit/module level, the reconciliation level, the end-to-end utilitarian level which is regularly utilized as acknowledgment tests from the client viewpoint, and the heap and execution level. So let’s have a look at the important points which we take care in mind while moving from legacy set up to DevOps implementation:

·       Are the resources properly utilized?

·       Is the Environment modularized and containerized and made portable?

·       Is continuous Integration in Place making sense to the final deployment

·       Is Automation Testing Framework in place?

·       Is the testing framework making sense?

·       Are we monitoring our matrices?

·       Have we set targets for future to achieve in terms of quality?

Refactoring legacy applications for containers and microservices

Another Crucial point to consider while moving from legacy systems to devops framework is to check whether we can make use of containers and microservices. The best and easiest way of containerizing is done via various tools like Docker, puppet and chef. These tools bring portability to applications and can run in self-contained units. With it you can containerize Operating systems, Applications, Environment variables as well as the tool chains. These in integration with CLI tools provides enormous impact on dev teams. With these you remove the phrases like it was working on my computer and I don’t know why it’s not working on your system. But again, there are certain points you need to take care in mind while implementing in legacy infrastructure

·       Check if we can re factor old applications or can write from scratch.

·       Check the design first before containerizing them.

·       Decouple the data from application layer.

·       Break application into components.

·       Build data as a service.

·       Even if our application is portable now, is that making sense according to business logic.

·       Legacy systems often lie on the same set of servers with access restrictions.

Nothing is Impossible

DevOps in the legacy framework is certainly not going to be very smooth, but it is certainly not a mission impossible, If we take care in mind the below points and start working on the basics first we can easily achieve portability and achieve some maturity in DevOps framework. Here are the points we need to start from:

• Testing Framework Automation.
• Selecting strategies for building out code coverage.
• Creating portable environments and loosely coupled infrastructure.
• Investing in cloud technologies
• Select the tools that makes sense according to the needs
• Integrate unit tests with the build system and deployment strategies
• Train staff how to perform automated unit testing and utilize the reports.

These are all vital points in enhancing legacy framework testability and in moving to a Continuous Delivery demonstrate. So, I am going to say it again DevOps implementation here will be difficult, but it is certainly not a mission impossible. Taking the above points in mind we are taking a monolithic application which is very tightly coupled and turning it into something that’s portable and the achievements are measurable with automation maturity which is meaningful and take people first approach.