Google Cloud Application Modernization Program: Get to the future faster

It’s been almost 10 years since Marc Andreessen coined the phrase ‘software is eating the world.’ In that time, organizations have come to realize the fundamental truth of this idea, and have started their own journeys into becoming software companies. As large enterprises embrace the journey, they are looking for advice and a proven set of practices to guide their progress. They don’t have 10 more years to figure it out.

Which is why today, we’re introducing Google Cloud App Modernization Program (Google CAMP). Google CAMP is based on our experience of driving application delivery at speed and scale. Examples of this scale include deploying 12M builds and running 650M test cases daily, along with processing 2.5 exabytes of logs every month and parsing over 14 quadrillion monitoring metrics. 

Google CAMP also reflects learnings gained via six years of research by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) into practices that drive high performance. Google CAMP allows large enterprises to modernize application development and delivery and drive improvements in speed, which directly drives a business’s bottom line. DORA’s research with over 31,000 IT professionals highlights that “Elite” teams that ship code numerous times per day are 1.53 times more likely to achieve or exceed their commercial goals, including profitability, and market share.

Google CAMP drives improved business results via three main components: 1) tailored modernization advice gained through a data-driven assessment; 2) concrete solutions, recommendations, and best practices for application modernization; 3) a modern, yet extensible platform for everything from writing code, to running, operating, and securing your applications.

The Google CAMP approach 

While the need for application modernization is evident, forging a path forward can be challenging for large organizations. Common hurdles revolve around maintaining visibility and control across disparate on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments, often resulting in a disjointed developer experience. Additionally, navigating the modernization path necessitates an understanding of how to drive continuous progress, while leveraging the right metrics to guide business and IT decisions. Finally, while changing culture is critical, it’s hard—common pitfalls include treating transformation as a one-time project or driving app modernization as a top-down effort.

Google CAMP addresses these challenges in the following ways, thereby helping large enterprises successfully modernize their applications:

1. Data-driven assessment and benchmarking: First and foremost, Google CAMP provides a data-driven baseline assessment. Whether you're building a Kubernetes, serverless, or mainframe application, the Google CAMP assessment shows you where to start your application modernization journey, identify your priorities, and how to maximize your ROI. 

Unlike a one-size-fits-all maturity model, the Google CAMP assessment is tailored to your organization, your processes, and your teams. You can benchmark yourself against other lines of business in your company, the overall IT industry, or elite performers within your industry. Next, the Google CAMP assessment shows you where your bottlenecks are and how to make the biggest and most impactful investments. 

Here’s an example of a final assessment report. Below, trunk-based development and monitoring are the highest impact and lowest current capability, making them ideal targets for the organization to prioritize as part of its application modernization initiative.

Before your teams take the full Google CAMP assessment and Google Cloud experts start to help you set your priorities, it is worthwhile to try our quick check assessment tool. Within a couple of minutes, you’ll get a good sense of how your organization is performing and identify some quick wins you can implement. 

2. A modern, yet extensible platform: Google CAMP leverages existing GCP product offerings to help you to build, run, secure, and manage both legacy and net-new applications. Google Cloud has end-to-end tooling developed from the ground up to support modern cloud-native principles. Examples of these principles include building on a strong security foundation, providing fast feedback on changes, gradual rollouts, rapid elasticity, etc. Tools available include Cloud Code, Cloud Build, Container Registry, and Cloud Ops. For compute, customers have the choice of using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, and Anthos. In Q2 of 2020 alone, more than 100,000 companies used these products to modernize their application development and delivery.

Adopters of tools available via Google CAMP have achieved both speed and reliability, while delivering higher-quality products and services at lower cost. 

MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group, a German holding company and the leading consumer electronics retailer in Europe with headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany, partnered with Google Cloud to modernize its applications. “In April and June with COVID-19 on the rise, we saw a 145% traffic increase across our digital channels. We responded to this shift by modernizing our apps and web shop using Google Cloud. This strong growth for our online business, built on top of Google Cloud, in turn made us the third largest e-commerce player in Germany,” said Johannes Wechsler, Managing Director at MediaMarktSaturn Technology. “Thanks to Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s fully managed compute platform, we are able to bring applications in the hands of our customers 8x faster than before and with a 40% cost reduction.”

Learn more about Google CAMP

Modernizing applications and software development processes is one of the hardest challenges facing today’s enterprises. With Google CAMP, large organizations across all industries can modernize to generate powerful business outcomes. Here are some ways you can learn more about Google CAMP:

• Watch the Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir keynote introducing Google CAMP

• Before engaging in a full Google CAMP assessment, do a quick check assessment to compare your performance with the rest of industry. With just five questions, it takes less than 2 minutes.

• Read more about how you can accelerate application development and delivery with Google CAMP tooling. 

• Consider how Anthos can augment your application acceleration plans.