Home > Servers > PowerEdge and VMware > White Papers > Kubernetes containers on Dell PowerEdge made easy with VMware Tanzu > App modernization: A closer look
App modernization has become a more common term recently with the rapid growth in use of nature of containers and orchestration. But what benefits does it bring? And what exactly is it? To answer these questions, we must look backward first.
The past three decades have brought the evolution and maturity of personal computing, the birth and explosive growth of the world wide web, a mobile computing revolution, the innovation and adoption of the Internet of Things, an ever-increasing amount of data, and a monumental shift to the cloud for organizations and end users alike. Backend data center computing models have shifted over that time from a monolithic, static client-server application and infrastructure model to a widely used virtualization paradigm, where virtual machines (VMs) hosted the interconnected middleware and backend database components of application stacks. Application designs grew more interdependent and compartmentalized, creating efficiency issues, VM sprawl, and management challenges— not to mention the challenge of shadow IT and integrating with the public cloud.
Containers are compartmentalized, and therefore well suited for application modularity. They break down components of applications so admins can easily recreate, move, and deploy them almost instantly. Using containers, for example, IT staff can deploy application stack components such as web or database servers in seconds, in contrast to the monolithic model that required an infrastructure request and waiting days for another team to respond.
Organizations that modernize their monolithic, legacy applications with containers could potentially take advantage of the features—portability, speed of deployment, and more—to improve business operations, expand the organization’s user base, and increase customer satisfaction.