Planning for cloud-optimized application transformation

The key benefit of having cloud-native applications is the scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness that we can get from using cloud services. However, cloud-native applications typically require major architectural changes and code to be rewritten if the legacy application is too old and has been built with a monolithic architecture.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to suit all scenarios. Depending on an organization's appetite to modernize and rebuild, there are a few options that can be used directly or in phases to transform a legacy monolith application into a cloud-native application using microservices and serverless architecture. Let's look at these options one by one.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

With IaaS, the applications are simply re-deployed on virtual machines hosted in the cloud. Compared to the other options, this approach disrupts the application code the least but brings minimal...