By Christopher Saul, Territory Sales Lead for East Africa at Red Hat
Recently, I have noticed a shift in how businesses in East Africa approach the topic of virtualisation. Developments among service providers are prompting many organisations to not just move away from legacy solutions but also to seize the opportunity to modernise their applications and infrastructure. Conversations about hypervisors slowly turn into discussions about containerisation and application modernisation.
This is an exciting trend as East Africa continues to adopt cloud computing, with the region now playing host to AI-ready hyperscale data centres, and hybrid IT infrastructure becomes the standard for forward-looking, digitally driven enterprises. But more than that, it gives enterprises a chance to rethink their relationship with their IT systems, specifically how they can take full control of it and avoid challenges or issues that arise from sharing infrastructure.
Modernisation: The need to get with the times
At its heart, application modernisation is concerned with updating, rather than outright replacing, legacy applications and software. Enterprises accomplish this by way of re-platforming applications onto a modern cloud computing platform, and reconfiguring their architectures for enhanced innovation, performance and agility.
Modernisation becomes more essential as enterprises face growing challenges surrounding virtualisation. These include rising costs in virtualisation platform licences and subscriptions, outdated technology that results in long deployment times and scalability restrictions, or tech sprawl owing to an organisation using multiple IT environments and platforms. This is why many enterprises today consider application modernisation to be essential for their success. According to the Red Hat State of Application Modernisation report, scalability and reliability are two of the most important reasons to modernise cited by surveyed organisations.
For many Kenyan enterprises, the answer is to consolidate, migrate their applications and workloads, and execute a modernisation strategy that leverages a single solution for their virtualisation needs. But before they do that, they should consider what the most optimal approach is in terms of packing and hosting their applications.
Containing all that potential
In the pursuit of simplicity and application optimisation, more and more businesses are turning to containerisation as the means to virtualise their resources. Containers become more appealing to businesses as applications become more critical to their organisation. They eliminate the need for a hypervisor layer by working directly with the organisation’s operating system (OS), which makes them ‘lighter’ and portable across different IT environments. Containers also open the door to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and the IT principle of DevOps where operations and development teams can collaborate on software, infrastructure and new business projects.
The smaller and more ephemeral nature of containers makes it difficult for organisations to manage them manually. Therefore, the value that businesses extract from containerising their applications is also dependent on the container orchestrator. An orchestrator like Kubernetes, one of the world’s most widely deployed software systems, handles all functions related to containers and lets organisations manage their lifecycles. Another concern for containers is storage, as storage only becomes available on the hosting server once it is deleted. Kubernetes, and enterprise versions such as Red Hat OpenShift, address this by using a persistent volume (PV) storage framework that lets developers provision persistent storage for container clusters. This is how Kenyan businesses enshrine agility in their software and it starts with a conversation about how they can best migrate and manage their virtualised resources.
Get modern with the help of AI
As is the case with any conversation regarding enterprise IT, talking about modernisation would not be complete without a mention of artificial intelligence (AI). As more and more Kenyan businesses start to explore the potential of AI, the technology offers new opportunities when it comes to modernising legacy systems and can help reduce their technical debt and increase productivity.
For example, using Generative AI (GenAI) tools, software developers can streamline the application lifecycle from planning all the way through to deployment. Tools can help developers understand what an application is, its technical feasibility, and what is required for it to be modernised, and automate certain processes such as code extraction. Developers can also use GenAI tools to test applications at different levels and generate CI/CD pipelines, enabling them to take applications to market and roll out update releases more quickly.
For many Kenyan businesses, the way to unlock new opportunities and value from AI is not by offering consumer-facing products and services, but rather by leveraging the technology from the backend and making it a key component of their IT infrastructure. And when implemented as part of a wider modernisation plan, that value becomes all the more apparent. Embarking on a modernisation journey may start with some hard questions about virtualisation, but they lead to something greater: a full-on embrace of new technologies, ways of working and transformative opportunities.
Also Read: Red Hat Accelerates Internal Developer Portal Adoption with Latest Version of Red Hat Developer Hub
