Modernising the Lifted Workload: The Architectural Decisions That Separate Cloud-Native from Cloud-Hosted

Short summary

A practical guide to modernizing lifted VM workloads into genuinely cloud-native architectures, covering workload assessment, managed service substitution, stateless redesign, and the strangler fig pattern for monolith decomposition. Key rules include externalizing state before containerizing, preferring managed services for non-differentiating infrastructure, and sequencing observability before service extraction. The article recommends allocating 20-30% of each sprint to modernization work and provides Kubernetes-specific guidance on probes, autoscaling with KEDA, and graceful shutdown.

• •Classify workloads into four categories to determine the right modernization path: containerize directly, externalize state first, use strangler fig, or substitute with managed services
• •Externalize session state, file storage, and scheduled jobs before containerizing — in-process state causes hard-to-reproduce failures in Kubernetes
• •Sequence modernization as: stateless redesign, observability pipeline, managed service substitutions, routing layer, then progressive bounded context extraction

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