Build New Modern Apps on AWS

Session Notes

This session explained what makes an application modern, why organizations modernize, and how AWS container, serverless, developer, and observability services support that journey. It also compared serverless and Kubernetes operating models and presented practical starting points for modernization.

What Is a Modern Application?

Modern applications combine:

• Modern technologies.
• Modular architectures.
• Agile software delivery practices.
• Automated operational processes.

Together, these capabilities help teams deliver customer value more quickly, frequently, reliably, and consistently.

Why Customers Build Modern Applications

Growth and Innovation:

• Reach the market faster.
• Enter new markets.
• Increase capacity to meet customer demand.

Scalability and Agility:

• Stay ahead of competitors.
• Release features and security patches faster.
• Increase customer loyalty and reduce churn.

Efficiency and Cost Optimization:

• Reduce operational inefficiencies.
• Lower infrastructure and licensing costs.
• Improve resource utilization.

What Drives Modern Application Success?

Organizational Foundations:

• Build a culture of innovation.
• Focus engineering effort on business differentiators.

Application Models:

• Containers.
• Serverless computing.

Supporting Infrastructure:

• Storage and data.
• Networking.
• Compute.
• Infrastructure orchestration.

Modern Application Components

Modular Architecture Patterns:

• Microservices.
• Containers and serverless functions.

Agile Developer Processes:

• DevOps.
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery.
• End-to-end security.

Serverless Operational Models:

• Event-driven architectures.
• Automated IT operations.

Approaches to Building Modern Applications

Serverless Operational Model:

• Automates infrastructure through AWS APIs.
• Supports autonomous development teams.
• Abstracts and simplifies infrastructure.
• Requires less infrastructure management.
• Can provide the lowest total cost of ownership for suitable new applications.

Kubernetes Operational Model:

• Automates infrastructure through Kubernetes APIs and tooling.
• Often uses a central platform team.
• Supports internal developer platforms.
• Provides flexibility, portability, and customization.
• Benefits from a broad open-source ecosystem.

Many organizations use both models and select the right one for each workload.

Reducing Operational Overhead

Modern managed services reduce the effort required for:

• Capacity planning and scaling.
• Software installation and maintenance.
• Infrastructure provisioning.
• Security and network configuration.

This allows development teams to spend more time on:

• Application code.
• Data-source integrations.
• Features that differentiate the business.

Modern Software Delivery on AWS

Application Authoring:

• Developers manage application code.
• AWS IDE Toolkits, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and AWS CodeArtifact support development workflows.

Source and Artifacts:

• Amazon Elastic Container Registry and Amazon ECR Public store and distribute container images.

Build:

• AWS CodeBuild provides managed build capacity.

Test:

• AWS CodeBuild can run automated tests.
• Third-party tools can be integrated, including GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins, Travis CI, SonarQube, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Deploy:

• AWS CodeDeploy supports managed deployments.
• Deployment workflows can also integrate with GitLab, Spinnaker, and Argo CD.

Monitor:

• AWS X-Ray and Amazon CloudWatch provide tracing, metrics, logs, and operational visibility.
• Prometheus, Grafana, Container Insights, and OpenTelemetry can extend observability.

What Customers Are Building

Consumer-Facing Applications:

• Web and mobile applications.
• Interactive websites.
• Mobile games.
• Ecommerce applications.
• Telehealth services.

Generative AI:

• Chatbots, virtual assistants, and personalization.
• Applications that integrate with and invoke foundation models.
• Model training and inference workloads.

Data Processing:

• Media streaming.
• Fraud detection.
• Object tracking and sensor fusion.
• Autonomous vehicle and advanced driver-assistance simulations.
• Internet of Things and robotics workloads.

IT Automation:

• Standardized developer platforms.
• Application integrations.
• Workflow automation.

Industry Applications

Financial Services:

• Consumer and mobile banking.
• Trading and exchange platforms.
• Risk and financial modeling.

Healthcare and Life Sciences:

• Patient-care applications and portals.
• Remote-care systems.
• Payment and claims processing.
• Image and data processing.
• Genomic sequencing.

Media, Entertainment, and Games:

• Direct-to-consumer streaming.
• Broadcasting.
• Mobile games.
• Virtual reality platforms.

Software and Internet Independent Software Vendors:

• Customer-facing products and services.
• Multi-tenant applications.
• AI applications.
• Media and data streaming.

Why AWS for Modern Applications?

• AWS offers a broad set of container and serverless compute services.
• More than 1.5 million customers use AWS database, analytics, machine learning, container, or serverless services.
• AWS provides a deep set of cloud security tools.
• AWS supports 143 security standards and compliance certifications.
• More than 200 cloud-native services are available to help modernize development, operations, applications, and business processes.

Common Modernization Challenges and Solutions

Challenge:

• Developers wait days or weeks for infrastructure.

Modern Approach:

• Developers provision infrastructure on demand and deploy in minutes.

Challenge:

• Software is deployed manually and inconsistently.

Modern Approach:

• Continuous delivery pipelines automate software delivery.

Challenge:

• Security is configured separately for each application.

Modern Approach:

• Security best practices are built into every application and service.

Challenge:

• Developers lack visibility into production systems.

Modern Approach:

• Applications are instrumented to collect metrics, traces, and logs.

Challenge:

• Teams and business units use inconsistent tools.

Modern Approach:

• Organizations standardize tools, platforms, and engineering practices.

Modernization Is a Journey

Application modernization is commonly a two- to three-year journey across the application estate:

1. Assess the application landscape.
2. Build new modern applications while managing legacy and migrated systems.
3. Modernize more of the existing application portfolio.
4. Continue optimizing cloud-native applications.

Over time, this journey should:

• Reduce the cost of IT.
• Increase business velocity.
• Improve the percentage of the application estate using modern practices.

Modernization Pathways

Organizations can streamline modernization by moving toward:

• Cloud-native architectures.
• Managed databases.
• Open-source technologies.
• Modern DevOps practices.
• Modern analytics platforms.

Where to Start

Technical Signals:

• Technology is old or no longer supported.
• Applications have performance or scalability problems.
• Required skills or institutional knowledge have been lost.
• The codebase has too many defects or tightly coupled spaghetti code.
• Integration is expensive and difficult.

Business Signals:

• The application is critical to business success.
• It directly serves customers.
• It has a significant effect on revenue.
• It provides market differentiation.
• Its expected value exceeds the modernization cost.

The best starting point is usually an application with both a clear technical need and meaningful business value.

Customer Example: BILL

Challenge:

• BILL needed to accommodate growth and scale over time.
• Its on-premises platform architecture constrained speed and efficiency.

Solution:

• BILL refactored its infrastructure using Amazon Elastic Container Service and AWS Fargate.
• The architecture improved elasticity.
• AWS took on more server-management responsibility.
• Development teams gained more time for growth and innovation.

Outcome:

• Significant reduction in operational costs.
• Capacity to handle approximately 150,000 to 200,000 requests per minute.
• New environments could be created within weeks instead of months.
• Developer productivity improved through better tools.

Key Takeaways

• Modern applications combine modular architecture, agile delivery, security, automation, and observability.
• Serverless and Kubernetes are complementary operating models that suit different workload and organizational needs.
• Managed AWS services reduce infrastructure work and allow teams to focus on business value.
• Modernization should be treated as an incremental journey rather than a one-time migration.
• Organizations should prioritize applications where technical pressure and business value intersect.
• Standardized delivery pipelines, built-in security, and production observability are central to sustainable modernization.