In fact, an S&P Global Market Intelligence survey found that the complexity of existing legacy apps is the top barrier business and IT leaders face when looking to improve the customer experience.

Maintaining outdated systems can also be costly. A typical IT department spends over half its budget on maintenance and only 19% on new innovations, Deloitte finds. Moving to modern solutions doesn’t just save money—it frees up developers to focus on what matters: building better, faster apps that push your business forward.

Why app modernization matters

When companies modernize their apps, they can see immediate wins for both their teams and their users. Here’s what it can do:

• Keep downtime low and security high: Transitioning to a cloud-native architecture allows updates to be released faster and with less risk.
• Scale apps faster: Containerization allows apps to run smoothly across multiple environments, boosting deployment speed and scalability. Running apps in the cloud means you can quickly scale resources up and down based on app usage and data volumes.
• Get more done, faster: Cloud-native architectures let developers to build, test, and deploy in production-like environments, which means they can release code faster and with fewer bugs. 
• Boost performance with microservices: Microservices in the cloud give your app more flexibility and reliability since they can be upgraded or replaced separately without affecting the rest of the app.
• Increase the pace of innovation: Modern apps often use platforms that enhance collaboration, such as real-time communication and version control systems, which accelerates idea exchange across departments, fueling both creativity and productivity.

It’s true that app modernization can be an extensive effort, but the good news is that most companies can start small with less intensive actions that still have powerful impacts for users (we’ll cover this in more depth later). Plus, cloud technology partners like AWS and Redis Cloud, the whole process gets a lot simpler and faster. 

If you’re ready to modernize your apps, here are some tips to help make the process easier and get your new apps up and running quickly. 

1. Start small

“As our customer base expands, how do we keep costs under control and provide low latency at scale?” It’s a question every growing company faces. You can’t sacrifice growth for higher failover rates and increased maintenance costs, so what do you do? 

The good news is, there is a relatively low-effort, high-impact action you can take to gain immediate performance improvements without a complete system overhaul: Add an in-memory caching layer to your database. 

Niantic adopted Redis to balance their server load and give players a better experience. To support heightened player activity, Niantic caches high volumes of game data in a Redis cluster. All Pokémon GO servers can access this shared data, reducing latency and boosting performance for Niantic’s multi-player Raid events to keep users happy. 

A cache is a data storage component that can be accessed faster and more efficiently than the original data source. When someone requests to fetch data, a strong caching system provides a copy of that data in real time. 

When you add caching to your apps, it improves four key areas:

• Performance 
• Scaling
• Resource optimization
• Convenience and availability

In-memory caching is an incredibly fast way to retrieve data—taking less than one millisecond. This means fewer latency issues, and app performance is more efficient and reliable. Even data stored in slow databases can achieve sub-millisecond performance. 

In-memory caching, which is available with a caching system like Redis, can also reduce the load on backend resources like databases, APIs, and app servers, making apps easier to scale and  cuts down on operational costs. It also gives users what they want: fast response times. By keeping frequently accessed (“hot”) data close to the app, you deliver a smoother, better experience every time.

If you’re modernizing your app, in-memory caching is a simple, high-impact way to achieve high performance and reliability at scale.

2. Keep it simple

One of the easiest traps to fall into as you begin modernizing your apps is becoming tangled in a complex web of highly specialized single-purpose technologies. Using multiple tools for individual use cases can lead to data sprawl, confusion among your engineering team, and a slower path to modernization.

Instead, choose technologies that excel at meeting multiple use cases, support a wide variety of data types, and are simple to build with and operate. Redis provides a collection of native data types, including String, Hash, List, Set, Sorted set, Vector, and many more, that help you solve a wide variety of problems, from caching to queuing to event processing.

Using a data platform with a built in query engine is a great place to start. Query engines are optimized for searching, retrieving, and aggregating large volumes of data quickly, which is valuable for gaining real-time insights. They also allow users to write complex queries to analyze data across different datasets, and they can accommodate increasing amounts of data without sacrificing performance.

The Redis Query Engine, for example, handles high query volumes without slowing down, even during heavy traffic. That means your apps stay fast, reliable, and ready for your users.

A data integration tool makes managing your data simpler by eliminating data  inconsistencies and provides a single source of truth. Plus, with automation for moving and transforming data, developers spend less time on manual tasks and more time building.

The Redis Data Integration (RDI) tool can help your team synchronize data from your existing relational database into Redis in near real time so that app read queries are completely offloaded from the relational database to Redis. RDI can also connect with other change data capture (CDC) tools and streaming data so developers have a simple way to stream changes from various databases. 

With RDI, your developers can focus on application code instead of integration tasks and data transformation code.

Focusing on simplicity and using comprehensive, multi-use tools for your data will help streamline the entire process of modernizing your apps. 

3. Plan your cloud migration strategy 

Here’s how to approach cloud migration and why it’s a key step in modernizing your apps.

Prioritize workloads first

Migrating to the cloud is a big step, but not every workload needs to move right away. Start by identifying which workloads are ready for the cloud, so your tech team can stay focused on core responsibilities instead of getting bogged down with scaling, troubleshooting, and operations during the transition.

When deciding the order of workloads to migrate, you shouldn’t necessarily choose the “least important” first. A cloud readiness assessment will help you figure out the right order, making it a key part of your migration plan. If you’re not sure where to begin, AWS offers advice on how to prioritize apps for initial migration. 

Don’t just “lift and shift”

A “lift and shift” approach should not be your default choice for a cloud migration strategy. Many times, it’s better to refactor and re-architect your app from scratch, remodel the data, and then run the new cloud-native version in the cloud. This can save a lot of wasted time if (more likely, when) the on-prem versions of your workloads are not immediately compatible with your cloud architecture.

Get the right team on board

Plan for worst-case scenarios

You should also be thinking about failover protection. When you migrate your workloads to the cloud, you have to choose whether to run them across multiple regions. The global public cloud infrastructure is divided into regions, and within each region, there are data centers, also known as availability zones (AZs). The AWS Cloud, for example, spans 108 AZs within 34 geographic regions worldwide (as of October 2024). Your cloud app could run in only one region—but if there’s a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, and the system goes down, then so does your entire app. But if you choose a multi-region deployment, your app will have failover protection.

Another benefit of using multiple cloud regions is keeping servers as close to users as possible, which reduces latency and improves performance.

Cloud migration in summary

A successful cloud migration takes careful planning, the right expertise, and a step-by-step approach that prioritizes the right workloads. As you move away from legacy systems, take advantage of what the cloud has to offer—but plan smart to make the process smooth and effective for your business.

This guide can help you migrate your Redis workloads to Redis Cloud on AWS. Download Now!

4. Obsess over UX 

Modernizing your apps isn’t just about making things better for your teams—it’s about putting your users first. Every decision you make should focus on delivering fast, reliable, and personalized experiences that keep them coming back.

Superlinked developers trust Redis to launch personalized experiences in hours, without the need for advanced machine learning, MLOps, or data science. Redis Cloud delivers a highly responsive, scalable vector database and index that Superlinked uses to manage user and content representation with vector embeddings.. Since deploying Redis Cloud, Superlinked has sustained periods of non-stop heavy usage (100+ vector search queries per second) with 95-percentile latency at 30ms. 

Focus on these key areas to deliver the best user experience for your modern apps.

Session management 

The session state is how apps remember user identity, login credentials, personalization information, recent actions, shopping cart items, and more. Reading and writing session data at each user interaction must be done without degrading the UX. 

Redis makes session management easier by enabling dataset sizes to grow linearly and seamlessly without requiring changes to the app’s code. It also offers support for extremely large datasets by using intelligent tiered access to memory (DRAM, persistent memory, or Flash), so you can handle growing demands without sacrificing performance.

Personalization

Personalization is all about giving each customer an engaging, uniquely tailored experience that encourages them to come back for more. With fast, efficient data retrieval and manipulation, your app can deliver product recommendations, customized content, or dynamic user interfaces based on real-time inputs. 

Redis can also be used as a caching layer to store user data, such as previous app interactions or viewing history. That means quick data retrieval and faster, smoother, and more personalized experiences every time.

By hyperscaling your architecture and focusing on session management and personalization, your app can deliver an experience users won’t want to leave.

5. Break it down 

Modernizing your systems can feel overwhelming, but like the saying goes, “There is only one way to eat an elephant: one bite at a time.”  Breaking complex apps into smaller, manageable pieces makes the process smoother and helps you scale more efficiently.

Specifically, a microservices approach helps your team move faster and work smarter by letting you scale and deploy each part of your app independently.. This improves fault isolation (the process of finding and containing a bug or vulnerability) and encourages teams to be more innovative by allowing them to experiment with new technologies without disrupting the entire system. 

Breaking down your app into microservices can make your code less complex, but it doesn’t always make deploying or managing your code easier. For instance, instead of having one app to debug, you now have six or ten. Still, microservices can be beneficial as you modernize—particularly if you employ microservices caching. Because caching allows you to quickly access data without repeatedly querying the underlying source, it can improve the efficiency of each microservice, ultimately improving performance for the entire app. 

Many organizations today are also updating their architectures, moving to containerized apps, often using Kubernetes as the standard platform for container scheduling and orchestration. Redis offers a Kubernetes operator to simplify the deployment and management of Redis clusters on Kubernetes by automating tasks like scaling and failover.

Despite the potential for added complexity, a microservices or containerized strategy can be exceptionally helpful to organizations that need to scale their apps quickly as they grow. 

6. Increase the pace of innovation (not the cost)

One of the main goals of modernizing your apps is to speed up innovation, and using a serverless database is a smart way to make that happen.  Serverless databases (DBs) are cloud-hosted database services that eliminate the need for devs to manage clusters or nodes. Instead, devs can create a DB with a simple click or API call. This makes it easier to manage and scale your apps and also prevents overspending. 

With instance-based DBs, devs must choose among hundreds of cloud instances without understanding how the service works. Some instance-based database vendors don’t make it clear that the usable storage in their service instances is much smaller than the total dataset size they advertise.. This leaves developers choosing the wrong instances, scaling up sooner than expected, and paying more than they need to.

Serverless databases like Redis handle scaling, automatically, adapting to changing data and traffic demands. They take care of infrastructure, capacity planning, and server maintenance, saving you time—and preventing you from overspending on your database.

Rather than building new serverless apps from scratch, you can also re-platform existing apps to AWS-managed containers to cut operational costs and improve the performance of your apps. Re-platforming lets you tap into cloud features like auto-scaling, so your apps can adjust to demand in real time. This helps prevent the over-provisioning of resources to handle peak traffic, keeping costs low and maintaining performance consistency during traffic spikes. 

Re-platforming with AWS also gives you access to enhanced AWS security features like built-in identity and access management, automated patching, and encryption of data at rest, which keeps your app secure and compliant.

The bottom line is that taking advantage of serverless databases will accelerate development and streamline deployment, leading to faster release cycles and faster time-to-market for your business. 

7. Adopt a DevOps model

To truly create a cultural shift that will enable your team to deliver modern apps at scale, you should begin to implement DevOps services and tools to build products faster while maintaining high performance and security standards. 

Moving to Redis made it simple for Mitto to prepare for the company’s future scaling needs. It was easy for Mitto to migrate from a single OSS Redis shard to the new Redis cluster that Mitto’s devs weren’t even aware of the change. Redis is a key part of Mitto’s diverse tech stack, which also includes: HAProxy servers, RabbitMQ clusters, redundant clusters of Percona Server for MySQL, and Elasticsearch, all working together to support Mitto’s modern DevOps model. 

The goal of DevOps is to integrate teams that were traditionally siloed, including development, operations, and quality assurance (QA) departments. DevOps teams focus on ways to automate and integrate development, quality testing, and production of apps and services to ultimately reduce time-to-market. 

Modern DevOps teams aim to deploy and manage infrastructure like databases, just as they do with app code. Changes to databases are treated like a code deployment to be managed, tested, automated, and improved — all with the same kind of seamless methodologies applied to software code. 

Databases are now part of the modern continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. If your DevOps pipeline doesn’t include the database, it can become a bottleneck that slows the delivery of new features. 

Redis fits very well into this DevOps model due to its ease of deployment, rigorous unit and functionality testing, and the ease of automation through tools such as Docker, Ansible, and Puppet. Redis helps DevOps teams meet their goals with less management toil, lower overhead, and faster release cycles. 

Modernize your apps with Redis and AWS

Updating legacy systems and modernizing apps ‌critical steps for businesses that want to stay competitive. Following the seven key strategies outlined in this guide will help your team achieve app modernization as you continue to scale: 

1. Start small: Implement in-memory caching to deliver faster, more reliable app performance without a full system overhaul.
2. Keep it simple: Avoid unnecessary complexity by using multi-use tools like Redis, which supports various data types and streamlines data management.
3. Plan your cloud migration strategy: Take a strategic approach to migrating workloads, leveraging AWS tools to ensure scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
4. Obsess over UX: Prioritize UX through session management and personalization, creating apps that are fast, reliable, and engaging.
5. Break it down: Adopt microservices and containerized strategies to improve scalability, fault isolation, and agility.
6. Increase the pace of innovation: Utilize serverless databases and re-platform apps with AWS-managed services to reduce operational overhead and accelerate development cycles.
7. Adopt a DevOps model: Embrace a DevOps culture with modern tools and processes, integrating Redis into CI/CD pipelines to enable faster releases and more efficient operations.

While these strategies can help modernize your apps, their success heavily depends on the environment in which they are implemented. Cloud environments, like those powered by AWS, provide the scalability, security, and flexibility necessary for modern app architectures. AWS offers many tools, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, and Amazon S3, that work seamlessly with Redis to meet the needs of modernized apps.

Together, Redis and AWS deliver a robust foundation for app modernization. Redis’ in-memory performance, versatile data structures, and ease of integration empower devs to build faster, more scalable apps. AWS complements Redis by providing a secure, globally available infrastructure that simplifies cloud migration, supports modern development models, and enables real-time data processing at scale.

By leveraging Redis and AWS, your team can focus on innovation, deliver exceptional user experiences, and future-proof your apps. 

Book time with a Redis solutions architect to begin modernizing your apps today.