Why Application Modernization is Vital for Business Growth

Teams modernize an existing application by taking the following steps:

• Designing and architecting the new application
• Implementing the application transformation, which could involve rehosting, redeploying, replatforming, refactoring, rearchitecting, or replacing the existing system or application
• Validating and testing the modernized application
• Deploying the modernized application

MongoDB’s modernization approach accelerates these steps by leveraging agentic automation to analyze the full application stack, dynamically rewrite and modernize the application end-to-end, and generate/run comprehensive test suites. This AI-driven automation supports a deeper understanding of legacy code and helps teams accelerate safe and accurate modernization.

Application modernization has a variety of advantages, including increased developer productivity, reduced infrastructure costs, better application performance and customer experience, faster time to market, more frequent releases, and increased business agility. MongoDB helps organizations achieve these benefits dramatically faster, reducing modernization efforts from years to months and decreasing manual effort by over 70%. By modernizing the full stack, including the data layer, it replaces rigid legacy structures with flexible, modern data foundations built for change and long-term innovation, enhancing security, resilience, performance, and ensuring better technology investments.

A successful application modernization strategy can involve teams rehosting, redeploying, replatforming, refactoring, rearchitecting, or replacing it. MongoDB supports comprehensive full-stack modernization, going beyond simple "lift and shift" database migrations or code conversion to transform application logic, architecture, and the underlying data model from rigid legacy structures to modern, agile systems on MongoDB.

MongoDB offers a software-powered, productized solution that combines engineering-driven teams, proven methodologies, and agentic automation (AI-driven, intelligent automation) to accelerate the transformation of complex legacy applications into scalable, modern services running on MongoDB. It is specifically designed to reduce technical debt and unlock innovation up to 10x faster than traditional approaches.

Modernizing legacy systems can feel risky. MongoDB de-risks modernization through deep inspection and analysis of legacy code using generative AI, comprehensive test coverage, and repeatable transformation patterns. It also helps teams restructure legacy relational data into optimal, performant document-based models. This approach minimizes disruption and ensures that what's working remains intact while transforming brittle code and outdated infrastructure.

Yes, the modernized applications built on MongoDB's data platform are AI-ready, with native support for vector search, semantic retrieval, and real-time operational queries. The modernization process helps establish a foundation that can easily integrate future AI-driven features.