Scaling your startup through cloud app modernization

Startups often face the challenge of scaling applications as their customer base grows and demands increase. A key benefit of modernizing your cloud infrastructure is the ability to scale your applications quickly without the constraints of traditional, on-premise systems.

In this guide, we’ll explore the core components, techniques, and benefits of cloud application modernization, giving your startup the tools it needs to navigate this crucial stage of development.

What is cloud application modernization?

Cloud application modernization is transforming based on evolving architecture needs and systems to leverage modern cloud technologies. By modernizing applications, startups can shift away from monolithic architectures and adopt more flexible, scalable, and modern architecture using cloud-native, managed, and serverless services that enable continuous innovation.

However, budget constraints, security risks, and legacy system complexities often block startup modernization efforts. Many early-stage startups begin with a minimal viable product (MVP) that relies on minimal resources rather than a thoroughly modern architecture that can evolve as the company grows.

Benefits of cloud application modernization

Cloud application modernization offers many benefits for startups looking to scale their operations and stay competitive.

Improved performance

By breaking down monolithic applications startups can ensure that their applications run more efficiently, even under increased demand.

Increased accessibility

Cloud-based applications enable startups to deliver services and solutions more efficiently to a global audience. With improved accessibility, startups can expand their market reach, deliver enhanced customer experiences, and provide consistent access to applications or services.

Gain competitive edge

Modernizing your cloud applications allows startups to innovate faster and react quickly to market changes.

Key components of cloud application modernization

Understanding the foundational components that enable efficiency is essential for building a successful cloud application modernization strategy.

Microservices architecture

Microservices architecture breaks down applications into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled individually.

This decentralized approach allows startups to innovate faster, as development teams can work on different services without disrupting the entire system. Microservices also support greater resilience, as issues in one service are less likely to impact the whole application.

Container orchestrator

Implementing microservices often means managing numerous containers, each running a specific service or component. Containers allow you to bundle code and dependencies into a self-contained package, making it easier to deploy across various environments. However, manually managing many containers—from placement to scaling—can become overwhelming, especially as your startup grows.

That’s where container orchestration tools come in. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) offers a simplified, AWS-native way to deploy and scale containers. At the same time, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a managed Kubernetes solution for teams with Kubernetes expertise. These orchestrators automate tasks like distributing containers, monitoring their health, and dynamically scaling them based on traffic or resource usage. For startups and scaleups, automating container operations reduces overhead, so you can focus on building features rather than maintaining infrastructure.  

Serverless computing

Serverless computing enables startups to focus on writing code without worrying about managing infrastructure. AWS Lambda, for example, automatically executes code in response to triggers or events (like HTTP requests, database changes, or file uploads) and scales the necessary computing resources on-demand.

With serverless computing, startups only pay for what they use. For example, imagine a small e-commerce startup that runs flash sales. Traffic can surge unexpectedly when a new sale goes live.

Rather than pre-provision servers and risk over- or under-allocating resources, the startup can use this tool. Hence, the application automatically scales during peak loads and then scales out when traffic returns to normal. Since you only pay for what you use, this model cuts operational overhead and lets the team spend more time optimizing customer experiences.

Scalable data stores

A modern cloud infrastructure must support scalable data stores that can grow with your business. In AWS, you can pick from numerous managed database options, like Amazon DynamoDB for key-value and document workloads or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for traditional relational use cases.

This “right tool for the right job” approach ensures you select the best database engine for your specific performance, latency, and scaling needs. You can explore the complete AWS database portfolio, which includes purpose-built services for everything from caching to analytics, helping you maintain high availability and reliable performance as your startup’s data demands evolve.

By relying on managed services like Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon RDS, the operational complexity of database scaling is eliminated and you can quickly scale to accommodate these fluctuations, maintaining low latency and minimal downtime.

Event-driven architecture

A modern cloud infrastructure must support scalable data stores that can grow with your business. In AWS, you can pick from numerous managed database options, like Amazon DynamoDB for key-value and document workloads or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for traditional relational use cases.

This “right tool for the right job” approach ensures you select the best database engine for your specific performance, latency, and scaling needs. You can explore the complete AWS database portfolio, which includes purpose-built services for everything from caching to analytics, helping you maintain high availability and reliable performance as your startup’s data demands evolve.

By relying on managed services like Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon RDS, the operational complexity of database scaling is eliminated and you can quickly scale to accommodate these fluctuations, maintaining low latency and minimal downtime.

Considerations for cloud application modernization

Startups need to carefully assess various factors when modernizing applications for the cloud to ensure a smooth transition and long-term success. A successful application modernization strategy begins with the business needs in mind, followed by a focus on the appropriate technologies. Let’s explore these considerations.

Technical requirements

Assessing your applications' technical requirements is crucial before embarking on cloud modernization. This involves:

• Evaluating your existing architecture.

• Understanding the dependencies between different components.

• Identifying potential compatibility issues.

CTO’s quick-start checklist:

1. Inventory technology stack: Create a list of all application components, including frameworks, runtimes, and third-party services.

2. Assess resource constraints: Determine staff expertise, budgeting needs, and existing infrastructure limitations.

3. Map critical dependencies: Document core services and APIs that must be available for essential features.

4. Plan for downtime or migrations: Decide on a strategy for seamless migrations (e.g., blue-green deployment) to avoid service interruptions.

5. Document security & compliance requirements: Factor in data privacy, encryption needs, and regulatory compliance before choosing tooling.

Starting with this checklist can help startup CTOs quickly identify gaps, align modernization goals with team capabilities, and minimize unexpected hurdles during implementation.

Cloud infrastructure

Choosing the right cloud infrastructure is essential when building out a microservices-based or cloud-native application. Early-stage startups need security and flexible pricing that aligns with their growth trajectory.

Integration and interoperability

Modern cloud applications often interact with third-party services, APIs, and other cloud environments. Integration and interoperability between these services are critical for seamless operations.

Startups must ensure their modernized applications can easily connect with external systems and services. This often involves adopting standardized communication protocols and ensuring your cloud infrastructure supports integration across different platforms.

Common integration scenarios for startups can include: 

Identity and access management: Integrating Amazon Cognito for user authentication and authorization across multiple services. Amazon Cognito can also federate with external identity providers—like Google, Facebook, or Microsoft Active Directory—ensuring a seamless login experience while maintaining secure, centralized identity management

Communications and notifications: Incorporating SMS, email, and push notifications through services like Amazon SNS.

CRM and customer support: Syncing user data with platforms like Salesforce or Amazon Connect to streamline customer interactions.

By considering these integration scenarios and selecting cloud services that support easy, flexible connectivity, your startup can focus on innovating rather than navigating complex, siloed systems.

Scalability and performance

Achieving true cloud scalability requires more than just expanding data capacity. Organizations must align their application infrastructure, networking, and storage solutions to effectively handle growing workloads while maintaining performance. To drive innovation with AI and analytics, teams should implement a comprehensive data strategy that enables seamless scaling across all components while integrating smoothly with modern application architectures. This holistic approach ensures systems can grow efficiently while supporting advanced capabilities in AI and data analytics.

For instance, an early-stage e-commerce startup could:

• Capture user activity in real time using Amazon Kinesis, storing transactions and clickstreams in Amazon S3.

• Transform and organize data with AWS Glue, then perform an in-depth analysis using Amazon Athena or Amazon QuickSight.

• Run core application services on AWS Fargate for containerized workloads, automatically scaling up during flash sales and scaling down when traffic normalizes.

• Leverage Amazon Bedrock to implement generative AI features, integrating foundation models directly into the e-commerce platform. This enables the creation of personalized shopping experiences through AI-powered product recommendations, intelligent natural language search across product catalogs, and automated customer support using conversational AI. The platform can also automatically generate and optimize product descriptions, translate content for global markets, and create targeted marketing copy - all while maintaining consistent brand voice and scaling efficiently as the business grows.

Startups can achieve scalable growth by integrating flexible computing services (like containers or serverless), optimized data pipelines, and advanced AI technologies. This combination allows applications, analytics, and AI features to scale simultaneously.

Adoption of GitOps and DevOps practices

Modern operational practices like DevOps and GitOps can significantly streamline cloud application modernization. DevOps fosters collaboration between development and operations teams, ensuring faster, more reliable software delivery.

GitOps takes this further by using Git repositories as the single source of truth for application configurations, infrastructure, and deployments. This allows startups to automate and manage infrastructure changes like they manage application code.

Team skills

Cloud application modernization requires your development team to be proficient in cloud-native technologies. This includes skills in containerization, microservices, serverless computing, and modern DevOps practices. Startups should invest in upskilling their teams or hiring new talent with the right expertise to ensure a smooth transition.

How cloud application modernization works

Modernization of cloud applications isn’t always about fully refactoring or rebuilding your codebase. Often, rehosting—also known as a lift-and-shift approach—can be enough to begin reaping the benefits of the cloud. 

Re-hosting example: For instance, you might lift and shift your existing on-premises database—running the same engine and OS configuration—onto Amazon EC2. This move preserves your application’s overall architecture while reducing the need for on-premises data center maintenance. You gain the benefits of running in the cloud (like on-demand scalability) without significantly altering your code or workflows.

Re-factoring example: Suppose you decide to go a step further and rewrite portions of your application. In that case, you might adopt serverless computing or container orchestration for microservices that weren’t previously containerized. By refactoring code and adjusting workflows to leverage these cloud-native features, you can optimize performance while reducing the operational overhead of managing infrastructure directly.

Building a cloud application modernization strategy

To develop an effective modernization strategy, follow these key steps:

1. Assess existing applications 

Start by evaluating your current application portfolio to identify which systems suit modernization. This assessment helps understand application dependencies, architecture, and business impact, forming a solid foundation for planning the transition.

Architecture review: Employ the AWS Well-Architected Tool to evaluate current applications against best practices and identify potential issues.

2. Prioritize applications and workloads 

Not all applications require the same urgency for modernization. Prioritize those that offer the most strategic value, such as core customer-facing applications or those with high performance and scaling needs. 

Impact assessment: Consider metrics such as usage frequency, growth potential, and operational costs when deciding where to invest modernization effort.

3. Choose the right platform 

Selecting the right platform is a critical decision. Your chosen platform should support your startup’s current needs and have the flexibility to scale as your business grows. Evaluate which platform best supports your technical requirements, security needs, and budget.

Platform alignment: Explore managed container services (e.g., Amazon EKS or AWS Fargate), serverless (e.g., AWS Lambda), or VM-based approaches (Amazon EC2), depending on your technical requirements.

AWS startup builds solutions: Leverage AWS and partner-developed options with two deployment methods tailored to your startup’s industry and technology needs.

Budget and security: Evaluate the total cost of ownership, compliance requirements, and potential benefits of AWS-native security services, such as Amazon Cognito (for user identity management), AWS Security Hub (for centralized security insights), or AWS WAF (for web application protection).

4. Testing and Validation 

Extensive testing is necessary to ensure everything functions as expected. This includes performance testing, security testing, and validating the integrations with other systems or services. Regular validation ensures that modernized applications meet your startup’s needs and perform optimally in a cloud environment.

Performance testing: Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics and AWS X-Ray for distributed tracing to verify application responsiveness.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Set up pipelines with AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy for automated testing and deployment.

Integration checks: Confirm data flow and API connectivity using Amazon API Gateway or other relevant services to ensure interoperability.

5. Perform regular security assessments 

Cloud security is a top priority during and after the modernization of the application. As startups scale their cloud environments, conducting regular security assessments to identify vulnerabilities and mitigate risks is essential.

Security monitoring: Implement Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Macie to detect anomalies and ensure continuous compliance.

Identity and access management: Keep tight control over resources using AWS IAM roles, AWS IAM Identity Center and AWS Organizations for multi-account governance.

Encryption and compliance: Use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for data encryption and manage compliance with AWS Config.

Partnering with experts

AWS Startups offers comprehensive support for startups, providing scalable cloud infrastructure and specialized development tools and resources tailored for each growth stage.

Our startup success stories:

AWS has helped companies of all sizes launch, scale, and transform their industries. Here are just a few examples of startups achieving rapid growth and innovation on AWS:

Wefox Italy is a leading insurance company that transitioned its infrastructure to a multi-tenant SaaS model using Amazon EKS. They moved their applications to a microservices architecture, implementing strict tenant isolation and leveraging AWS managed services for improved scalability, security, and operational efficiency. This transformation allowed Wefox Italy to better serve its customers while reducing costs and enhancing their ability to innovate rapidly.

CONXAI, a construction technology company, uses Amazon EKS to run AI models that analyze construction site images and videos. Their solution helps detect safety hazards, track project progress, and monitor equipment usage in real-time. By leveraging Amazon EKS and GPU-powered instances, they efficiently process large amounts of visual data to improve construction site safety and productivity.

Skello, a workforce management company, used AWS Database Migration Service to seamlessly transition from a monolithic to a microservices architecture. They implemented continuous data synchronization between their old and new systems, allowing for a gradual, non-disruptive modernization of their application while maintaining business continuity.

Looking for additional support? AWS also provides startup-focused programs like AWS Activate, offering credits, training, and expert guidance to help you innovate and scale rapidly.

By working with AWS’s dedicated network of startup partners, you gain access to proven best practices and expert guidance designed to help you scale confidently.