Companies move applications from data centers to the cloud for a variety of reasons. Many want to develop products and services sooner to compete with fast-moving competitors. Some want to take advantage of new advanced analytics and generative AI capabilities. Others want to lower their data center overhead, scale their operations more easily, or do a better job of countering sophisticated cybersecurity threats.
But whatever their goals, simply migrating to the cloud isn’t enough. Companies must also modernize their legacy applications to truly transform their business. Modernization enables developer teams to add advanced capabilities, collaborate better, create new products and features faster, scale easily and cost-effectively, and improve security.
Today’s organizations are increasingly adopting a platform engineering approach to application modernization. A self-service platform, also known as an internal developer platform, is a centralized collection of tools and technologies serving as a foundation for application modernization and management. By 2026, 80% of large organizations will have established self-service platforms, according to Gartner.
As with many other technologies before it, a self-service platform can be obtained through a “build” or a “buy” model. Teams new to the cloud are often uncertain about which model to choose.
With the buy model, the organization purchases third-party software to create the self-service platform. This relieves teams from having to make decisions about technologies they are unfamiliar with. However, because they license the self-service tools, rather than owning them, they can’t customize the platform to fit the organization’s specific needs — or modify it later to accommodate evolving technologies such as generative AI and advanced analytics.
For that reason, some organizations choose the build model, which offers unparalleled flexibility, customization, and adaptability. But it also poses significant challenges for teams attempting to construct a platform on their own. Self-service technologies are extremely complex, and selecting the right tools to solve business problems or create desired capabilities is critical to success. Without deep cloud experience, developers often spend years experimenting with different solutions before they find the right mix. And while they’re working on that, competitors are launching new products that could eat into their market share.
SoftServe’s Application Modernization Platform (SAMP) enables businesses to reap the advantages of the build model while avoiding its challenges. With years of experience in AWS cloud, SoftServe’s engineering teams use carefully selected cloud services, tools, and technologies to help companies develop a highly customized self-service platform that is uniquely and forever their own.
There are no licensing fees for the SAMP framework — companies own the platforms they create and can reuse the tools SoftServe provides to establish repeatable processes, speeding the development of both the platform itself and applications, as well as their modernization. SoftServe’s research has found that companies of equal technological maturity using SAMP launched their self-service platforms in an average of four months, compared to two years for those trying to create a platform on their own.
With a flexible self-service platform designed to accommodate their needs, developer teams can focus on modernizing existing applications and creating new ones instead of wasting time experimenting with technologies that may not work. They will be able to launch new products and features sooner, improving their competitive position. And they can easily and cost-effectively expand on the self-service platform in the AWS cloud to accommodate the resulting new demand.