It’s no secret that organizations face an overwhelming array of cloud services, products, and tools. Most don’t have the time or capacity to try and find the best way to streamline their IT environments — they simply want to focus on their products and services as they grow.

However, the increase in data complexity and lack of a clear cloud strategy hold many businesses back from reaching their full potential. With 75% of companies looking to simplify their cloud strategies and 88% of tech executives citing working across cloud environments as a barrier, it’s clear there’s a need for a modernization solution.

THE DRIVE TOWARD PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Organizations have recognized that their digital priorities extend beyond mere infrastructure management, and now they also seek to:

Accelerate time-to-market for new services and features
Modernize applications
Implement robust security standards
Scale automatically with demand
Operate globally with unified processes
Optimize costs and improve ROI

Platform engineering has emerged as the solution to these needs, combining DevOps principles with business agility to create self-service platforms for developers. This approach shifts the focus from being solely on infrastructure management and security compliance to also include product development and innovation. The goal is to enable faster deployment cycles and improve business outcomes.

Platform Engineering Challenges

However, building a platform from scratch presents significant challenges. The process requires diverse expertise across multiple components, with specialized knowledge needed for each building block.

Additionally, it demands a substantial time investment to properly construct and implement the platform. Organizations must establish standardized processes and best practices that can be followed consistently across all of their teams and departments.

Without proper expertise, these efforts often result in poorly designed solutions that fail to meet the company’s business needs. Perhaps most critically, inadequate implementation can create serious security vulnerabilities that put the organization at risk.

These challenges frequently lead to inefficient resource utilization and increased technical debt that can hinder the organization's modernization journey.

ACCELERATE THE TRANSITION TO PLATFORM ENGINEERING WITH SAMP ON AZURE

SoftServe's Application Modernization Platform (SAMP) is an accelerator designed to help companies build a scalable, secure, and customizable platform. It directly addresses the platform engineering challenges through several key capabilities that can transform your modernization approach.

Bridging the Expertise Gap and Building a Strong Foundation

At its base, SAMP bridges the expertise gap by providing pre-configured solutions based on Microsoft Azure best practices and incorporating expertise from across various Azure services. This reduces the need for specialized in-house talent while establishing a well-architected foundation for scalability and performance.

While SAMP leverages Microsoft Azure's cloud infrastructure and services — particularly Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as its primary container orchestrator — it also supports other orchestrators such as Azure Container Apps, Azure App Services, and AKS on Azure Stack HCI for on-premises/hybrid deployments.

Speeds Up Time-to-Market

To accelerate time-to-market, SAMP enables platform deployment in as little as 20 minutes and streamlines the development lifecycle with integrated CI/CD tools. As it’s ready to plug into any CI/CD process, SAMP gives application teams the ability for optimized operations, faster delivery, and lower costs. The platform also modernizes organizational processes and systems while increasing development velocity using automated workflows.

Ensures Standardization and Governance

Standardization and quality control are achieved with pre-defined standards and best practices that provide consistency across the organization. Having standardized processes facilitates easier application management and scaling, which improves overall quality.

The platform leverages Azure Policy initiatives to enforce regulatory compliance with built-in checks for SOC 2, HIPAA, and FedRAMP standards across the entire infrastructure and Kubernetes environments. SoftServe’s configuration expertise means the platform maintains strict governance controls and provides automated compliance enforcement that delivers consistent adherence to regulatory requirements.

SAMP further establishes comprehensive budgeting and cost management practices to track spending and optimize resource allocation, along with standardized naming and tagging conventions for increased clarity.

Built-In Security and Best Practices

Security is fully addressed by integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud and incorporating Azure Policies and Well-Architected Framework principles. SAMP provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities, ensures compliance with industry regulations, and implements a zero-trust architecture.

Built-in features also include extensive identity and access management, data encryption at rest and in transit, continuous security posture assessment, secure DevOps practices, and advanced network capabilities.

Guaranteed Cost Efficiency

Cost optimization is another key focus, with SAMP reducing cloud infrastructure costs by up to 30%. These savings are achieved through multiple approaches, including:

Comprehensive budget and cost monitoring capabilities across environments

Advanced automated autoscaling solutions configured by SoftServe to go beyond standard out-of-box scaling features

Strategic cost reduction through Azure Reservations and Savings Plans

Integration of specialized cost-monitoring tools like OpenCost, KubeCost, and CAST AI

Additionally, costs are further reduced through SAMP's broader operational benefits, such as:

Decreased time-to-market for new features and services

Minimized operational overhead through standardization

Modern technology stack that ensures more efficient resource consumption compared to legacy systems

Reduced need for specialized in-house expertise

Optimized workload configuration and management across cloud environments

By taking this approach to cost optimization, SAMP delivers substantial long-term savings while maintaining high performance and operational excellence.

Scalability, Flexibility, and Continuous Improvement

It’s often a struggle to build a platform that balances standardization with the flexibility necessary to accommodate diverse organizational requirements. As companies grow, they face increasing issues in maintaining performance, controlling operational costs, supporting varying deployment models, and managing complex resource allocation across multiple services and regions.

SAMP addresses these with its innovative architecture that combines a standardized foundation with extensive customization options. The platform harnesses Azure's robust infrastructure while incorporating advanced scaling capabilities. These include Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler for optimizing node counts, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for managing replica scaling, and Vertical Pod Autoscaler for efficient resource allocation — all expertly configured by SoftServe to match specific business needs.

Organizations can deploy workloads with remarkable flexibility thanks to SAMP's integration with Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Apps. This versatility supports everything from basic containerized applications to sophisticated microservices architectures for consistent performance across geographic regions with comprehensive monitoring and demand-based scaling.

The platform keeps pace with technological advancements with built-in monitoring, assessment, and optimization features. By continuously evolving alongside both business requirements and industry innovations, SAMP provides lasting value while it maintains its effectiveness as a long-term solution.

These features all combine to deliver powerful results: seamless global scaling without performance loss, optimized resource utilization and costs, reduced operational overhead, and reliable support for applications of any complexity.

SOFTSERVE’S EXPERTISE SUPPORT FOR GREATER SUCCESS

With expertise gained from SoftServe's 20-year partnership with Microsoft, our experts bring deep technical proficiency in Azure Kubernetes Service and have earned specializations in Kubernetes on Azure, analytics on Azure, and infrastructure & database migration to Azure.

This expertise allows our teams to enhance SAMP's capabilities further, combining our Azure knowledge to expand upon AI/ML services with advanced analytics capabilities. All of this works together to achieve operational excellence by embracing DevOps culture, enabling greater efficiency and confident deployment.

EMPOWERING BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SAMP: A COMPREHENSIVE MODERNIZATION SOLUTION

In an era where modernization is crucial for business success, SAMP provides a comprehensive solution that addresses the complex challenges organizations face. By combining SoftServe's expertise with Microsoft Azure's robust infrastructure, SAMP enables organizations to focus on innovation and business value rather than infrastructure management.

The platform's integrated approach to security, governance, scalability, and cost-efficiency ensures that organizations can reduce complexity, achieve their business objectives, and modernize their applications with confidence.

As technology continues to evolve, SAMP's flexible and adaptable nature ensures that your business will remain competitive and agile in our ever-more digital world.

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Accelerating App Modernization with SAMP on Microsoft Azure